Inside The Second Eyelid (Shanghai) 掀开进入第二眼睑(上海)
2021
Digital Video, 04:10 电子视频,4分10秒
The short animated film was created during the stillness of a pandemic lockdown, as the artist spent three months immersed in the air, the dampness, and the muted grey of Shanghai. A city built upon the early 2000s' dazzling dreams of the future, Shanghai pulses as a financial and international hub, its skyline wrapped in blue-tinted glass that reflects progress. Its green rivers carry distorted echoes of outlandish skyscrapers, while street corners hum with the strange resonance of English, Mandarin, and Shanghainese.
For a child raised in the old districts, the Oriental Pearl Tower loomed like its namesake—a jewel from the East—its glow illuminating the mirrored streets and urban-polished faces. This luminous presence subtly suggests the physical fusion and spiritual estrangement of a new generation, tethered to local history yet adrift, forming fresh layers of collective memory within the city’s historical web.
The film incorporates image-to-image AI in selected scenes—not today’s sorcery of text-to-video generation, but a slower, laborious process: hand-drawn animations transformed frame by frame by a visual AI, each "colored" image stitched back into a flowing sequence. Only two scenes—the view from an interior gazing outward and the blinking alien creature at the end—bear the mark of this clumsy method. Both feel subtly invasive, slightly uncanny. Perhaps it's an ambivalence: a simultaneous embrace of and skepticism toward the algorithms and its power, an uneasy dance between human craftsmanship and the black-box logic.
这部短篇动画影片制作于疫情封锁的静止时刻。艺术家在上海的房里关了三个月,沉浸于窗外(想象的)空气、潮湿和静谧灰色。上海,建立在2000年代初关于未来辉煌梦想的城市。作为我国的金融和国际中心,蓝色反光玻璃包裹城市天际线,反射进步的光芒;绿色的河流倒映着奇装异服的大厦,街角回荡着英语、普通话和上海话。
对一个在浦西老城区长大的孩子来说,东方明珠"人”如其名——一颗来自东方的珠宝。它的光芒反照在镜面般的街道和被都市磨砺过的一张张面孔。这种辉煌的又安静的存在冥冥之中暗示了新一代居民的在技术发展下的身体变革与精神疏离。他们被地方历史所牵绊,却又漂泊于其上,在城市的历史网络中形成了新的集体意识层次。
影片在某些场景中引入了image to image AI技术——这并非等同于当下的文字生成视频的魔法,而是一种更慢、更费力的过程:手绘动画逐帧经过视觉AI的处理,每一帧“上色”的图像被拼接成流动的序列。只有两个场景——从室内向窗外外眺望的片段和结尾处那个眨眼的外星生物——带有这种笨拙方法的痕迹。两者都隐隐透出一种侵入感,略显一种诡异的矛盾:对算法及其力量的拥抱与质疑,一场人类手工艺与黑箱逻辑之间的不安舞蹈。










VastLab Experimental VLX5, Los Angelas CA, 2023, 3x3 Mag Annual No.20 Honorable Mention, 2023