Forever is a masterwork by artist ZHU Jia, in which an old-fashioned tricycle was readapted into the installation with a small video camera fixed on its left wheel. As the vehicle moved forwards, urban landscape in Beijing was thus captured. Accompanied by a noisy snore, the rhythm of rotation was controlled mainly by traffic on the roads, leaving the viewers dragged into a giant vortex of dizziness.
Completed in 1994, Forever enjoys an international reputation as an experimental video work in early history of Chinese contemporary art and has been exhibited several times in important venues including New York MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), etc. The artist in this piece concentrates on "the relationship between images and psychological and visual experiences". Attaching the camera to the wheel is in fact an action which gets rid of grasp of human eyes and hands and reminds spectators of existence of the camera, as well as viewing as behaviour itself. Reeling and bizarre, these images outline a unique visual experience of cities in existence. Simultaneously, the background sound conveys a message which is paradoxical and unexpected: forever revolving and forever monotony are woven peacefully into a same fabric where unusual experience is reconstructed after disturbance of audiovisual perception.
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