About Chinese artist Xu Bing's film debut, Dragonfly Eye. It is a drama with no cameramen or actors, and its footage is all from public surveillance video.
Dragonfly Eye originates from the art image practice that artists and the public participate in together, reflecting the fuzziness of the boundary between art and reality in the background of the rapid development of new technology era. The details of the real surveillance video, the virtual script design and the complete plot woven by the montage all reveal the artist's profound reflection and criticism of the absurd phenomenon of the objective material world and the media landscape. As for me, I saw that the scenes under surveillance appealed to the objectivity of reality, while the plot and editing techniques were designed to turn objectivity into subjectivity by relying on film technology. People who were not connected in society were instantly placed in the same media space by technology. I was shocked when I saw the surveillance footage. It has a kind of unconscionable reality, unlike all drama. Surveillance gives us the perspective of God, while we can see the ruthlessness of reality. I found inspiration in this film when it discussed the interconnectedness of technology between people.

As Xu Bing mentioned when talking with a team about the story behind Dragonfly Eye, "The world has become a huge studio, and every one of us is captured 300 times a day by various cameras." The world record in the material is the daily experience and real feelings of China's reality, mixed with the reality of lighthearted daily life and disaster.

So I think "seeing" is one of the core elements of Dragonfly Eye, and "seeing" comes from "eyes". In phenomenology, Merlo Ponti regarded "seeing" as "a certain way of entering objects" -- it is through the participation of "eyes" that we establish the existence of the "world" and present the "world" we want to see. (The discussion also relates to the project being developed at Term2, where apparently technology has enabled glasses to see the virtual and going back to the theory means that virtual worlds already exist and we are building the "world" we want to see.)

Although the film looks different from Xu bing's past works in form, it can still find clues to the inner form and thinking method of art. For example, "The Story behind" is a very beautiful ancient landscape painting made of a lot of garbage and branches. However, this painting does not exist, because it is not made of canvas or rice paper. It is actually a shadow, a painting produced by processing light and shadow in space. On the issue of discussion between real and virtual, Xu brought me a lot of intuitive inspiration, such as Xu likes to use many of the traditional art media means to express, often expressed in the past to the future, According to Marshall McLuhan (2019) as same as the one in his communication theory, "we are through the rearview mirror to look at the current, but we in the future." And the Chinese scholar Hu Yong (2019), in his commentary, "Just as an artist needs to conceive a work of art backwards from beginning to end. Only by playing it backwards can we see the unfamiliar in the familiar, experience the old in the new and be shocked by it, so that in the end we are only predicting what has already happened."