kai sholmes blog

On Seeing A Film Endless by Guo Xi

Reading time: 1m

A Film Endless by Guo Xi is an installation located by the riverside of Huangpu, at the back of Shanghai’s West Bund Museum. I stumbled across this installation as I was taking a stroll by the river, trying to read the words on the screen—it turned out to be a poem about the passing of time. With the flowing of the river, cargo ships slowly passing by, children running around and laughing in the background, the atmosphere was just right.

The artwork consists of a black border in the dimensions of a movie screen, with a real screen sitting on the bottom, displaying “subtitles” in both Chinese and English. The description conveys the artist’s intention to create a “collective cinematic experience”, where everything we see within the border; the river, ships, people, as I described; is the content of a film. With the ever-flowing river, ever-changing weather, with people passing by and the sky transforming from day to night to day, the “film” is truly endless. Not only does it capture the inevitable passing of time, it captures the essence of this metropolis that is Shanghai: a city that is ever-changing, the current view of the West Bund unimaginable to somebody from ten years ago. In a country like China that chases after Western Modernism like a dog chases after a stick, everything becomes different with the blink of an eye.

Maybe it’s easier to get sentimental when you’re near a body of water, but when I saw A Film Endless by the Huangpu River, I thought I understood everything the artwork had to offer.