Visitor, 2007, video, 7 minutes, 11 seconds. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Visitor, 2007, video, 7 minutes, 11 seconds. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
TB2023 cinema program
Visitor (2007) is a video work that Taiwanese artist Wang Ya-Hui made early in her career. It begins with a white cloud floating in a cloudy sky. The cloud moves slowly with the camera in its wake, our eyes involuntarily following it into an old house. This is the residence of the artist’s grandparents and the setting for some of her childhood memories. The white cloud seems to be both visitor and guide, floating leisurely through different rooms.
Through a series of static shots, Wang reveals the interior of a well lived-in home. The impulse to perceive and visually catalogue all the details of domestic life revealed in these images is frustrated by cloud’s mesmerizing motion. There is no dialogue in the film. We hear only ambient sounds: the sudden ringing of an alarm clock, a television playing traditional Taiwanese opera. Wang’s seemingly simple gesture of integrating real scenes with a virtual cloud creates a complex and off-kilter experience of time and space. The sense of elapsed time collides with the scenes before our eyes, as if we were entering what the artist called “a lucid daydream.”
Through her artworks Wang constantly pondered and internalized the language of images. She drew the viewer into an experience weaving together traces of memory and mutually referential experiences in life. In April of 2023 Wang tragically passed away. Throughout the brief 50 years of her life, she was like the cloud in her video, both a visitor and a guide.
