Skip to main content

Zhong Kui and the Reform of Hell

eteam

2019 00:55:56 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
History, Multimedia, Myth, Performance

Description

For their first collaboration, artist duo eteam and the Hong Kong Puppet and Shadow Arts Center have developed a powerful opera-play that combines ancient stories and analog story-telling technologies with the digital tools and scripts we have available now.

Zhong Kui, mostly known as the ghost catcher, is still frustrated about the unfair treatment he once received due to his facial appearance. Assisted by the White Bone Spirit, a shape-shifting demoness, who ended up in hell when she resisted her abusers, Zhong Kui catches a ride on a drone and leaves the hell of ancient times. He is now among us as a computer specialist behind a screen, who catches bots and viruses.

Zhong Kui and the Reform of Hell draws a connection between storytelling and handheld devices. With the physical presence of the puppeteers in bringing ancient characters to life, eteam reveals the mechanics of how stories and news media are created. Yet, once a viewer is drawn into the story, these mechanics seem to disappear. The suspension of disbelief hovers in a state of fluctuation and one can’t help but wonder who is human, who is ghostly, who is artificial, who is controlled, who is operating, who is spirited and who has personality: the operators, the puppets, the technological devices, or the systems that keep them in proximity?

eteam uses video, performance, installation and writing to instigate and articulate encounters at the edges of diverging cultural, technical and aesthetic universes. Through their artistic practice eteam finds ways to collaborate with people who operate on the edges of mainstream culture and the marketplace. They are drawn to those willing to experiment, cross genres and cultural boundaries, together we forge proximity and make visible the interconnections we humans share with land, animals, plants, ghosts, deities and objects. Practicing art is their way to enter the “outside,” pay close attention to the details, while trying to understand the whole.

eteam’s narratives have screened internationally in video- and film festivals, they lectured in universities, presented in art galleries and museums and performed in the desert, on fields, in caves in ships, black box theaters and horse-drawn wagons.

They could not have done this without the support of Creative Capital and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Art in General, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, CLUI, Taipei Artist Village, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and MacDowell, the City College of New York, the Academy of Visual Art HKBU and the Fulbright Scholar Program, among many others. Their novel Grabeland was published by Nightboat Books in February 2020.

They received to Fulbright Scholarships to research the relationship between traditional puppetry and digital smart phones in Taiwan.

Also available from eteam is the book Buzz Cut