Synopsis
After shooting ‘SHe’,‘I’ fell into the bottleneck of creation. While interviewing some artists about how to break through the bottleneck period, I stumbled upon an artist’s body with a strange posture in his studio. Driven by curiosity and creative desire, ‘I’ began to investigate this dead artist with a camera. What happened next became more and more strange and uncontrollable…
Zhou Shengwei
Zhou Shengwei, digital artist/cross-border director, graduated from Peking University, currently study Animation and Digital Arts at the University of Southern California. His representative feature film SHE won the Best Animated Feature Film Nomination at the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival. Another film ART IS DEAD won the Spirit of Freedom Award at 14th FIRST International Film Festival.
Director's statement
ART IS DEAD is a mockumentary that blurs the border between fiction and reality. It is also a social experiment that combines performance art and conceptual art. I fictionalized the death of a non-existent artist ‘Liu Gang’. With such a hypothetical setting, I tested and captured the real attitude of people in society. Therefore, it is a ‘true lie’, which records the ecology of various social status of the Chinese society. In my opinion, because of the continuous development of the Internet, the boundary between fiction and reality has been blurred. Fiction is reality, and vice versa.
