Never Take Off
Zhu Jia
朱加
Production date
2002
Object Detail
Media
video (black and white, sound)
Measurements
8 min 57 sec
Notes
Like the Japanese film director Ozu, whom he admires, Zhu focused on the everyday, on apparently banal repeated actions that provide glimpses of a deeper truth. In one instance, he placed a video camera inside a refrigerator to record its constant opening and closing, in another he projected an image of a goldfish on the floor, flapping helplessly as if out of water. Chinese artists at this time were reading the French theorists Foucault and Derrida, and questioning notions of objective truth, a heretical stance in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party. Zhu Jia, however, credits Chao Yuen Ren, the Chinese/American linguist, phonologist, poet and composer, as a significant influence on his ideas about meaning and language, and on his creation of non-narrative time-based works. In Never Take Off (2002), for example, a Boeing 747 circles on the runway, an endlessly prolonged moment of mixed anxiety and boredom, familiar to anyone who has experienced an airline delay, and a compelling symbol of the modern condition. These passengers are going nowhere –– Zhu Jia’s not-so-subtle metaphor for China’s political situation.
Accession number
2014.055