Joss
Cheng Ran; Item Idem;
程然
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
video (colour, sound)
Measurements
5 min 54 sec
Notes
Cheng collaborated with French designer and artist Cyril Duval (working under his alter-ego identity, Item Idem) on a video that was projected onto the façade of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2014. Joss paper, also known as ‘ghost money’ or ‘hell banknotes’, is burned at Chinese funerals to honour the deceased and provide them with all their needs in the afterlife. In recent years, the paper and papier maché items burned to venerate ancestors include replicas of consumer goods such as cars, electronics, high fashion items, even fast food and cigarettes: Joss opens with a distant shot of a carton of cigarettes, labelled ‘Hades Smokes’. To the haunting strains of ‘Ave Maria’ flames lick slowly towards the cigarettes along a fuse, across a cement floor, then engulf them in slow motion. Two designer handbags burn and explode, showering sparks. More Chanel and Louis Vuitton bags follow. We realise that these luxury objects of desire are just models made of paper, plastic and tin, blown up one after another, like fire crackers welcoming the lunar new year. Flames consume toys, pizza boxes, food and furnishings, sacrificial offerings to appease angry gods: a supermarket of death. In a knowing homage to cinema history, particularly to the explosion sequence in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), and also to Viola’s Fire Woman (2005), the work represents binaries of creation and destruction, greed and generosity, the sacred and profane. At the end the sky rains sparks and ash, and the beautiful soprano voice soars and swoops. The effect is hypnotic, sublime. Cheng Ran and Item Idem ask us to consider the complex tug-of-war between the human longing for the divine, and the spirit of consumerist greed that dominates social discourse in contemporary China, and elsewhere.
Accession number
2015.555