Pas de deux

Medium: Two-channel Video

Date: 12/2022

I made this project in a critical care rehabilitation hospital in southern China. The hospital is mainly composed of patients, rehabilitators, caregivers and patients' families. The patients are accompanied by their families or caregivers and are led by the rehabilitators to do some physical exercises every day in order to regain their self-care.

During this time, due to China's strict epidemic policy, "healthy" and "unhealthy" have lost their traditional meanings for me, and I was in a state where I had no control over my own body. I could be defined as unhealthy at any time and lose my physical freedom. With this kind of apprehension, I could feel in my contact with the people in the hospital the transformation and the strength of the healthy and unhealthy bodies within the confined space of the hospital.

When I started editing this project, the sudden cancellation of China's epidemic policy allowed me and most of the people in the hospital to revert to the traditional "unhealthy body" due to viral infections. I presented the ambivalence of filming and the suffocating feeling of illness in a non-linear way. The project consists of two videos, one a continuous video recorded in the corridor leading to the rehabilitation exercise hall in the hospital, and the other a combination of images of the hospital and its surroundings.