Meng You

How do artists live in the Chinese world of today? Painters and poets have gone back to the dreamwalking wanderings and the intense discussions on art, love and philosophy that characterised the artists of the classical age. In the stifling summertime city, the plastic artist Li Wake comes to help the painter Wang Yongping make a film. The frontiers between what is true and false, between creation and existence, are abolished. Li finds a fellow wanderer, the young “Beibei Demon Face”, who is a night watchman and poet. They meet up and create in the studio of Ding Defu, an expressionist painter who has gone adrift, inspired by the biography of Van Gogh. They all love walking around naked and turning their bodies into poetic objects, from both provocation and a desire to abandon their social roles. “The disorder of our world resembles that of our hearts.” Following on from Floating dust, this is the second part of a trilogy about “survival in an absurd world”.