Mirage

Category ：Photograph, video art，documentary, installation, performance art

Artist:Tan Tan.

Production year: 2010

Participation of festivals, exhibitions:

• “New view of academy” Contemporary Art Exhibition, Fine Arts Literature Art Centre, Wuhan, China, October, 2010
• "Everyone’s Donghu lake" Art project, Wuhan, China, July-August, 2010
• “Boundless City” Wuhan in youth experimental video exhbition, Wuhan, China, November, 2010

The leading roles of this work series are some building models for promoting a real estate, which used to be the foreground to people's attention, but after the houses were sold they became nonsense.I brought the models traveling with me to many places in Wuhan city, and recorded the absurd relationship between them and our life space. During this course, I also showed them to public in several new forms, so as to make a “rebirth ritual” for their “dead bodies”…

Serie 1：Installation of photographs and videos

The scenes of building models traveling around Donghu Lake in Wuhan. In the videos, I inserted some shots shot by a candid camera when I was arguing with a lawyer employed by a property developer. A romantic life is always accompanied by some lies…

Examples of photographs / One of the exhibiting scenes

Serie 2: Performance art

I transformed one picture of “Serie1”into an advertisement poster, in which is a fictitious real estate project named “The Last Big Hair House By Donghu Lake” in 2100. The advertisement tells people that the developer has made a man-made “Donghu lake” by a lot of demolitions, after the real lake disappeared, therefore the project will be the only “Lake View House”just for the high society in Wuhan city.

I hung up the poster on a billboard at a bus station by Donghu Lake. During about half month, no one removed it, and many people believed that this was a real real estate project.

Serie 3: Multi-media installation

performance art + photography+installation+documentary

I set up a fake “sales office” for “The Last Big Hair House By Donghu Lake” in "Boundless City" exhibition at chi K11 Art Space, which is in a high-class business zone in the center of the city. On the opening day of the exhibition, I distributed many leaflets on the street to tell people the address of the “sales office”，meanwhile I hung up a poster again on a billboard at the bus station in front of the art space. Many people entered the art space for checking this “real estate project”.

Inside the “sales office”, there were some other posters of this fictitious real estate project, photos of the building models, a installation of the model, and a documentary ”Mirage—House Matters Of The River City” which recorded many people’s reactions in Wuhan, when they saw the building models suddenly showed up in many different spaces. Their various topics are from house prices to demolitions, the gap between the rich and the poor, even wars and terrorists… 

Examples of photographs and leaflets of the "real estate project"

Exhibition and performance art