A View with a Room

A View with a Room is about text, image and object, and demonstrates the disjuncture between these categories. The installation begins with detailed desc<x>riptions of spaces. From a word found amongst the wall text, viewers notice a peephole with a view into a room. Through a closed wardrobe, viewers pass a tunnel that leads to the concealed room. The installation is a visual translation of the wall texts and attempts a playful inversion: a 3-dimensional space that imitates the flatness and other pictorial characteristics of a black & white photograph. All the objects in this scene, based on a fictitious character, are in greyscale. Anything that touches the margins of the image, the borders of the room, is cropped like in a photograph. A painting, which is a copy of Isaak Brodsky’s Lenin in Smolny shows only the lower-half of the figure; and the cropped TV set shows the film Lenin in October dubbed in Mandarin. Apart from books and local groceries found in the room, traces of anachronism and nostalgia could be further extended to the clock rotating anti- clockwise, and the old calendar dated May 1968. Like dusk, the light from the window petrifies the room with perpetual twilight.