Born in 1978 in Guangzhou. Lives and works in Beijing.
There is a place called Night Museum that only opens after dark. Its collected works about "darkness" are on display — such as the American horror film 30 Days of Night, Chinese artist Chu Yun's installation Constellation, and even an iPad game based on the movie The Godfather.
The current exhibition is about La Town.
Everyone has heard the myth of La Town. Originated in Europe, after traveling through a space-time wormhole, La Town reappeared and scattered around Asia and Southeast Asia. It was last seen near the ocean bordering the Eurasian continent, vanishing as a mirage.
In the aftermath of an unknown catastrophe, La Town lost the sunlight and its track of time. The eternal darkness fell upon La Town, and all of the few exceptions of white night were momentously recorded in the township’s history. As it has drifted across different dimensions of time and space, the history of La Town has been retold multiple times, and details of the story is gradually fading away. Now, the story of the small town’s past - love affairs, politics, nemeses and disasters — have all been sealed beneath the museum’s vitrines, becoming the historical “specimens” of the only imaginative interpretation of La Town’s history.
Is there something always happening in this town surrounding by darkness? What kind of story does it possess? What forces started its journey through the distortions in time and space?
Visitors quietly wander between the displays. This is just the first exhibition after summer, there will be more interesting shows to come.
One can overhear few lines of a dialogue from the cinema of the Night Museum:
The Stranger: “Bar the windows. Try to hide. They’re coming.”
Eben Olemaun: “They? Who are they?”
