I SEE International Video Art Festival 国 际 艺 术 影 像 节

In “Beyond Geography”, Li Ran imitated the BBC Discovery travel series, playing the role of the host, as he led the camera to discover and explore the “exotic lands”. These “exotic lands”, however, are not real settings but are staged in a 3D digital film studio with a blue screen. Similar to the familiar methods of the Discovery Channel, Li Ran appropriated post-production technology to create an intense broadcasting atmosphere, simulated the sound effects of a real jungle, and fabricated a primitive tribe in this fake exotic land. Li Ran plotted the encounter between the host and the aboriginals, and simulated a colonist type of cultural visit. Thus, Li Ran has built up a recognizable scenario that has repeatedly emerged in our surrounding art system.

在“超越地理”中，李冉模仿BBC Discovery旅游系列，扮演主持人的角色，
因为他带领相机发现和探索“异国情调的土地”。然而，
这些“异国情调的土地”不是真正的设置，而是在具有蓝色屏幕的3D数字电影制片厂中演出。
类似于“探索频道”的熟悉方法，李冉利用后期制作技术创造了浓浓的广播气氛，
模拟了真正丛林的声音效果，并在这个假异国的土地上制造了原始部落。
李冉介绍了主持人和土着居民的遭遇，并模仿了殖民主义者的文化访问。
因此，李然已经建立了一个在周边艺术系统中一再出现的可识别的场景。

A breathless, vibrating, nearly psychedelic night trip through the inside of a sports utility van chaotically packed over and over with equipment for self optimizing leisure activities, creatin pills, nostalgic folkloristic and esoteric objects, etc. filmed as subjective view through an action-cam fixed on the head of a constantly monologizing person. We hear a stressed out voice, haunted by social decline fears amongst others, longing to somehow keep selfcontrol and healthiness via hi-tech self surveillance accessory, on the one hand, and to fall in love as solution to quite everything, on the other hand – not without completely mixing up the transgressive power of love with all kinds of consumers phantasmas and more or less un-
conscious exploiting it for the needed self optimisation.

The subjective super wide angle view, the strange crawling and searching, somehow animal-in-a-hole-like, movements, and the fragments like a hand, a leg or some shadows of hair that we rarely see appearing between everything else in the car, together with the stressed voice monologizing gives us the strange fealing as if the inner space of the person and the inner space of the car aren’t clearly seperable.

At the end of the film, as surprise and perhaps also »release« we hear a kind of very warmly improvised love song performed by two voices, plus piano – only that, if we listen to the text a little closer, it feels like a copy and paste of spam mail narratives …