Leo Gallery, Shanghai
There are many bus stops dot around Chiang Mai City that built for selling advertisement only. It is ridiculous because the city doesn’t have a good public transportation system. Most of public transportation has neither route nor fix price. It’s all by negotiation, which you can stop them wherever you stand. Most of the accessible stops provide only small sign without any seat and light. This work plays at non-functional bus stops around the city where the passengers are waiting for a bus that has never arrived. The acts of waiting are parallel to a larger situation of the country’s freezing progress.
Fleeting Strangers virtualizes 4 parallel worlds, and tells 4 soft sci-fi stories that happen at different times each in different ways. The leading characters in these 4 stories represent the Test Item, the Administrators, the Survivor, and the Cyborg respectively. They are gradually infringed, deprived, assimilated in the development of science and the manipulation of the system. They lost their loved ones, freedom and ideals, like beasts sealed in the darkness of the world or on the edge of the universe. Between the dawn and dark of their fleeting lives, they also struggled, trying to break through the cage of class and destiny and search for the barren homeland and self-salvation, nonetheless because of such contradiction, confusion, vulnerability and restraint for their awareness of being unable to act, they ultimately failed to escape the characters they have been set up. This frustration and disillusionment is precisely a self-projection to the cities developing extreme exploitation, the states of lives in constant anxiety and fear, and the fates of numerous ups and downs.
