The Stone Behind the Glass
Through the micro-history of Qinglianduo: a performative object in a performative space.Speculative Film/Installation/Research-based Art
This film approaches Qinglianduo—a Taihu rock preserved in Garden Museum—as a symbolic relic and geological object shaped by extraction, possession, and institutional framing. Moving between the museum and Lake Tai (a site of absence), the work embraces enforced distance: I cannot access the stone as Song literati once did. What inherited is already mediated: a redaction, a curated narrative, a representation.
︎full length film
Through experimental interfaces anchored on the stone’s porosity (formed by erosion-aesthetic criteria for valuing Taihu rock), the film examines the geological, dynastic, biographical, and institutional timescales simultaneously. I ask not what the stone is, but how it has been made to be through socio-political forces, historical intervention, and systems of preservation.
The film is a speculative practice as a field note/research report, rather than a documentation. While working on the edge of failure and playing with the tension between engagement and distance, it also acknowledges its own mediation.
Stills from the film:
