MORNING EXERCISE / 2017 
(Moving image, ​2'59")

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​In contemporary Chinese culture and made-in-china mass production, active life as a human condition has entangled with historical trauma and it has been passing through generations in both family scale and social scale. This video records two medal-age women doing morning exercise in a park. One talks about her way of cooking and domestic trifles with an aggressive but enthusiastic tone, and the other claps her hands monotonously. There is a nuance and ambiguous interpretation of the clapping as a political gesture in a public realm or as a physical exercise for biological self-preservation in a private realm. This further leads to explore the threshold between the public engagement, political participation and supplying for primary needs, everlasting biological physical-maintain. By the material nature of moving-image, this work discusses the complexity of vita activa (labor, work, action) and vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).