Exam
Yang Zhenzhong
杨振中
Production date
2012
Object Detail
Media
single channel video (colour, sound)
Measurements
23 min 40 sec
Notes
Exam is intended to be seen through a kind of peephole in the gallery wall, with a small screen placed at the end of a tunnel. The video shows two young girls in close-up, one wearing summer pyjamas, the other a lacy nightgown. They loll about, laughing, on pink gingham bedsheets, their smooth limbs entwined, seemingly oblivious to the voyeuristic gaze of the video camera. At first this suggests soft-core pornography, disturbingly staged in a young girl’s bedroom, complete with plush toys and a stash of cookies beside the bed. As we watch, we realise the girls are reading aloud a Marxist text that they are struggling to memorise. As they giggle, leaning languidly on each other, they are chanting, ‘The nature of socialism is preconditioned by socialist public ownership’ or ‘Proletarian revolution is historical progress moving ceaselessly’. Every school and university student in China must pass exams in political science, rote-learning socialist texts. Yang creates a disconnect between the image and sound in this work to reveal the contradictions of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The gaze of the camera reminds us of how citizens are surveilled, and of the disparities between private thoughts and public utterance.
Accession number
2013.099