Disguise
Yang Zhenzhong
杨振中
Production date
2015
Object Detail
Media
video (colour, sound), 3D printing
Measurements
video 1 14 min 40 sec
video 2 32 min 36 sec
video 2 32 min 36 sec
Notes
Disguise (2015), for which Yang was awarded the Fondazione Ermanno Casoli Prize, was an ambitious project in the Shanghai factory of the Italian Elica Electrical Appliances Company. Yang involved its employees in a workshop in which their faces were scanned in order to produce masks using 3D printing technology. Each employee was then asked to wear the mask of their own face and carry out their normal shift on the production line. In their white masks, evocative of street theatre and mime, they become performers: their normal physical actions in the manufacturing process become dance-like movements in the slowed down video, even though production continues uninterrupted. At the end of the shift, above the deserted assembly line, the masks hang as if each person has discarded their public ‘work’ face and returned to their private identity. In a second video, each worker is shot in close-up. As each dons their mask, shown in slow motion, their faces are ‘smoothed out’; behind their white masks, with all imperfections, blemishes and wrinkles erased, they appear both more and less than human. Yang Zhenzhong says that the actions of an ordinary working day were turned into a ‘sort of theatre’. The kabuki-like white masks, paradoxically, both accentuate and hide the facial features of the red and green-uniformed workers – we are reminded that behind each mask is an individual, with private desires and aspirations.
Accession number
2015.274