Ziyi Wang 王几
Land Sailing 边境航行 (2024)
Single-channel digital video
16 mins 42 secs
Edition of 3 + 2AP
Screening 8-30 November 2024
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Relation de Voyage
Ziyi Wang 王几: Land Sailing 边境航行Land Sailing 边境航行 tells the story of an Asian immigrant returning to the UK after an ordeal crossing the England Channel due to the refusal to board a plane and legally entering the UK. This road movie is mainly shot by action cameras, documenting from a first-person perspective a journey back from Paris on a Flixbus, via Calais and Dover by a ferry, illustrating a ten-hour crossing of the border and the geographic distance. This works tells a heartbreaking and serious story from a naive and innocent tune; it is feminine, gentle and poetic, containing shadow puppetry, Kazoo, paper boats and many other domestic and childlike elements.The Straits of Dover and the White Cliffs are historically important national images of the UK, as well as being the main crossing routes for refugees smuggling to the UK. By blurring the narration subject, Land Sailing 边境航行juxtaposes the current migrant scene with Odysseus' homecoming myth, constructing a fragile epic retold through the mouth of an immigrant woman, a "NOBODY". The film interweaves mythological archetypes with contemporary struggles, replacing the wrestle between mortals and gods with the tense relationship between immigrants and sovereign state bureaucracies. It attempts to re-interrogate Adorno's assessment of Odysseus as the first concept of modern civic citizen -- challenging the authority of the gods. It discusses how, in liquid modernity, an individual searches for identity and a place of belonging in a sea of mobility. -
The remains of the journey by CHEN Shuyu
In response to Land Sailing 边境航行 by Ziyi Wang 王几“Only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.”—KafkaDear Audience,Before responding to Ziyi’s Land Sailing, I invite you to make a paper boat. With just a few simple
folds, any sheet of paper can be turned into a vessel in your hand - empty, yet strangely full, ready
to embark on an imaginary voyage. It reminds me Michel Foucault noted in his lecture, Of Other
Spaces (1967), a boat is "a floating piece of space that exists by itself… and at the same time is
given over to the infinity of the sea”. For him, "in civilisations without boats, dreams dry up,
espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates”.
In Ziyi’s artwork, folded paper boat, pigeon, or aeroplane often appear as an ultra-light spatial
object, balancing the tension between playfulness and seriousness, while carrying complex ideas
and emotions.
Let the paper boat be your companion as you watch Land Sailing, which tells the story of today’s
Odysseus. It is a voyage stripped of heroism, no epic conquests or homecomings remain. Instead,
shaky footage, a seemingly childish voice and off-key musical elements guide us through a journey
of transgression - crowds of unnamed people moving across borderlands in search of identity,
adrift in systems they can never fully navigate or escape. They are the ones who remain on
endless journeys of non-arrival, in a turbulent world steered by the “big hands”.
In the final scene, a paper boat - cradled by a soft hand and gentle singing - lands beside a pillow,
waking a young girl who seems to have drifted off from a long journey. The greyish-green and off -
white quilt cover she has slept under is called Dover White, named after Britain’s famous border
cliffs. What dreams did she leave behind before waking up? The giant, the lighthouse, the paper
boat or some other distant shore?Bon voyage!
CHEN ShuyuArchitect and curator based in Malmö, Sweden -
Portrait of Ziyi Wang 王几 by Xiya Wang
