曹思懿
“Art can help.”
(Robert Adams, 2017)
Into the Shape of Water (2024)
Fictional Exhibition: An Archival Installation
6 minutes 3 seconds, single screen, colour, sound
This fictional show invites us to retrace the enigmatic final steps of Dewey Lee, the famed explorer who vanished at Bishui Town Museum in 2012, just before its demolition. This exhibition unfolds her legacy in fragments—a series of rock paintings she left as journal entries, delicate plant notes abandoned on her boat, and a documentary.
The documentary explores a haunting cycle: Lee’s perpetual appearance and disappearance along the Bishui River, mirroring the ghostly ebb and flow of Bishui Lake and its village. Here, the boundaries between past and present blur, offering a glimpse into a world where time bends and reclaims its own.
At first, I did a performance: I used the brushes and dipped them into the water in the lake, I tried to draw the scenes on the rocks in the bodies of water. After painting apart, the water on the rock would dry out quickly, so I photographed each part of the painting. At the same time, I have studied and been touched by the time and space of this lake by walking, collecting fossils and plants.
In this documentary, I used ChatGPT to make my scholarship sound more legitimate like writing in the tone of a journalist or scientist and how scientists talk about what they've found. I also used AI to generate most images and cloned my voice.
I try to show the fact that this disappears in time, show this fake documentary in this very dry and serious format, this the essential friction intention inside of it and become a frame within a frame film. but then I've re-stitched it to bring it back together, like, show the still images in the video, have talking and then show the images of the water paintings.