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Mediatheque
Zhou Xiaohu 周嘯虎
Ready-made Product of Media 媒體現成品
2003
One of the pre-eminent figures of video animation in China, Zhou Xiaohu began experimenting with computers and computer graphics in the late 1990s. Zhou’s four-minute claymation Ready-made Product of Media resembles a silent newsreel, presenting four vignettes in black-and-white numbered frames. These four scenes feature a press conference ending with an assassination; a car crash, resulting in two deaths; a woman undergoing her third cesarean delivery; and an electric chair execution. Although the central figures are present, the characters are reduced to stereotypes and lack specific features. Human bodies are instrumentalised in the production of a body politic and can be read literally as bodies functioning as resources to produce value in service of the state. Zhou makes this idea visually explicit through varying narratives of life and death.
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