Sleepwalking is a Therapy III
Yang Zhenzhong
杨振中
Production date
2007
Object Detail
Media
single channel video (black and white, sound)
Measurements
14 min 58 sec
Notes
The theme of the city has preoccupied Yang Zhenzhong for the last twenty years – unsurprising for an artist living in Shanghai, a metastasizing city spreading into the countryside. He is interested in the layered city of the imagination, the urban palimpsest of history and memory in which we live, even as the familiar beomes increasingly strange. Yang says, ‘People’s memories are constantly disappearing – the little streets or the parks where you played as a child are all gone.’ In Sleepwalking is a Therapy III (2007) his hand-held camera traverses the chaotic Shanghai streets and then flies high above them, attached to a remote controlled helicopter, in search of dark, hidden spaces. When exhibited in Shanghai, audiences had to enter an enclosed, cave-like space in order to view the video; they were forced into uncomfortably close proximity with the screen. Yang has said that he felt ‘tormented’ by noise and hustle and bustle when he first arrived in Shanghai: ‘Sometimes it was difficult to breathe’.
Accession number
2013.202