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Chen Zhou (Artist)

Chen Zhou (b.1987, Zhejiang province) received a bachelor’s degree from the Digital Media Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2009, and currently lives and works in Shanghai. He received the New: Vision Award at the 2017 CPH:DOX Film Festival for his debut feature Life Imitation, which has also been included in the Official Selection of the 61st BFI London Film Festival. Exhibitions he has recently participated in include: “2^nd Asian Film and Video Art Forum” (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2017), “After Us” (K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, 2017), and “Cold Nights” (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2017).

Dai Zhanglun

Chen Zhou’s reader and WeChat friend

14:00-15:30 Film Screening

15:30-16:00 WeChat Conversation between Chen Zhou and Dai Zhanglun

*Please arrive promptly.

Life Imitation

Release: 2017

Runtime: 82 min

Specification: HD Digital Film

Subtitles: Chinese and English subtitles

Foreign media reviews for Life Imitation:

It’s a virtual futuristic vision of a dark new world mediated through gaming, chat rooms and sexting, which exposes the conjunctions of technology, communication and gender. Structured through a dexterous mix of verité footage of young life in China, mobile phone screens and the ultra-violence of Grand Theft Auto that represents American life, Life Imitation focuses on young women exploring their identities and pushing their boundaries in the real and the virtual worlds. These characters occupy liminal spaces alienated from mundane daily life, but unfulfilled in the on-line world. They stare at their phones as if in expectation of a life-changing revelation from beyond, but all that comes is what has come before. Strange and compelling, the film creates an almost post-human identity, one that cannot exist outside the digital, but that strives unsuccessfully to fulfil the very human desires of bodily contact and emotional exchange.

--BFI London Film Festival

“Without spectacle and with deep ambivalence, the film creates an intimate portrait of the performance of the self in a hyper mediated world, calmly casting an insistent gaze on shifting experiences of sociality, gender, and technology.”

--Jury comments for the NEW: VISION Award at CPH: DOX