"Study for a 3-channel video (Patriarchy)"

// materials

Giclée print on archival paper

// Date

2024

This study stages ZhouKe in confrontation with an excavator, a machine of construction, demolition, and territorial force. The image turns power into scale, then places a body against it.

Scale

The excavator towers above ZhouKe as tool, animal, monument, and threat. It belongs to the landscape of redevelopment, where land is cleared and urban futures are imposed through machinery. The work treats patriarchy as a structure that exceeds any single person, yet remains visible in instruments, sites, routines, and forms of force.

Counterforce

ZhouKe’s arm-wrestling gesture is deliberately unstable. It is heroic, ridiculous, comic, and doomed at the same time. The work avoids the clean satisfaction of symbolic victory. Instead, it holds a physical contradiction: a small human figure meeting a system built to move earth. Resistance becomes a posture of contact rather than triumph.

Ruin

The rubble surrounding the action places the scene inside an already broken terrain. This is landscape after impact, a zone where built form, labour, and authority have left visible traces. As an instance of the larger sculpture, the work clarifies how ZhouKe’s identity is produced at the point of pressure, where agency is tested against systems that make the world materially heavier.

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JOURNAL LOG:
UNIT01®