Be Sampan

Artist
Rhett Tsai

Creation media and date
VR installation, plate print, 2021

Description
Be Sampan is a reflective creation by the artist, who returned to his hometown of Fujian to conduct field research, revolving around the theme of “from the Tanka to post-humanity in the present”.
The Tanka people / water people / boat people are a special group of people – they live on the water and cannot go ashore all their lives, mostly around Asia seas. As a long-standing concern of sociologists, “Tanka” embodies complex issues of water and land, pre-modern and modern, ethnic discrimination from people on shore, and stereotypes from Westerners who came to China in about 20th century.
Being inspired by an old friend, the artist fictionalizes Ah Xin, who is a Tanka and the main element linking the VR and graphic plates, and these two parts together form an individual narrative with a humanistic perspective in a larger historical context. The VR part takes the “search for Ah Xin, a Tanka ashore in Starfish Village” as the main line with three chapters “The Buoy”, “The Black Dream” and “The Land-Sickness” to unfold the various metaphors shown by the Tanka people in the complex relationship between “water and shore”. The graphic plate part is a collection of “Deformed Bodies” showing “the transformation of the human body by the technological society” from the perspective of Ah Xin after he went ashore, in order to reverse the discriminatory term “bowlegged” and to show to the shore. “The print section is a reflection on the dilemma of human existence in the post-human era and its aberrant shaping of the human body, written from the perspective of Ah Xin ashore.
Be Sampan is also a media experiment on VR: the viewer will experience boat rides, boat crashes, and confusion between left and right eye scenes, thus traversing the imaginary world of the Tanka people. “The Land-Sickness”, the chapter 3 in VR, is typical. The Land-sickness is a symptom of dizziness caused by the confusion of water and land space perception after some water people go ashore. In this chapter, the left eye of the VR glasses is the water world and the right eye is the shore world, and the viewer will go ashore in this spatial disorder to find Ah Xin.
The use of the extremely humanistic and vernacular perspective of the Tanka as a slice to think about the current post-human dilemma is based on the artist’s consistent attitude: the discussion of technology will ultimately return to “people”, and the Tanka, a group seemingly without any element of technology, has the universality of crossing time and space and breaking through the fetter of the inherent symbols. The act of “going ashore” from water to land essentially points to the destiny of human beings who cross their own history and have to go to an unknown future.

人如舢舨

艺术家
蔡宇潇

创作媒介及时间
VR装置、图版印刷，2021年

作品简介
《人如舢舨》是作者回到褔建故乡进行田野调查，围绕“从疍民到当下后人类”这一主題展开的反思性创作。
疍民是一种多见于亚洲水域的特殊族群——他们以水为家，终生生活在水上且无法上岸。“疍民”作为一种被社会学家长期关注的议题，体现出复杂的水-陆、前现代-现代、族群歧视（来自岸上人）、刻板印象（来自近代来华西方人）等的问题。
作品虚构了一位上岸的疍民阿欣（灵感来源于作者的一个故交），它是连接VR与图版两大部分的主要元素，这两个部分以人文的视角，共同构成了一部着眼于大历史语境下的个体叙事。VR部分以“寻找海星村上岸疍民阿欣”为主线，三个章节“浮标”、“黑梦”、“晕陆”切入疍民在“水-岸”复杂关系中展现出的各种隐喻；图版部分为阿欣上岸之后的视角撰写表现“技术社会对人类身体的改造”的《曲体集》，以扭转“曲蹄“这一歧视语并向岸上技术社会发问，对人类在后人类时代的存在困境与其对人形体的畸形塑造提出反思。《人如舢舨》同时也是一件关于VR的媒介实验：观者将经历乘船、坠船、左右眼场景混乱等情境，从而在关于疍民的意象世界中遍历。VR第三章是其中典型，“晕陆”是部分疍民上岸后因水、陆空间认知的混乱而产生的晕眩症状。在此章节中，VR眼镜的左眼是水上世界，右眼是岸上世界，观者将在此种空间错乱中上岸找到阿欣。
用疍民这一极度人文、乡土的视角作为切片来思考当下的后人类困境，是基于作者一贯的态度：对技术的讨论，最终都会回到“人”身上，疍民这一看似毫无科技痕迹的族群，身上具有打通时空、突破固有符号束缚的普遍性，从水乡到陆地这一“上岸”行为，实质上指向人类的那些跨越自身历史、不得不前往未知未来的宿命。