Text by Eddie Peake
March 2021
Zhang Xu Zhan, ‘Si So Mi' Hsin Hsin Joss Paper Store Series-Room 004, 2017
Single-channel animated video installation, colour, sound
5 min (looped)
Courtesy the artist
Death is the palpable centre of Zhang Xu Zhan’s ‘Si So Mi' Hsin Hsin Joss Paper Store Series-Room 004, yet the mice and combustible-paper funeral-sculptures who inhabit it possess an innocent and sanguine joie de vivre that provides the prevailing sensation of the work. The film was made in 2017 but it belongs to its own era: on the one hand, medieval and fantastical, while on the other, futuristic and sci-fi. The clearly labour-intensive as well as lovingly and emphatically handmade stop-motion animation style could also be said to be anachronistic during this period of over-saturation of CGI rendered graphics and cartoons.
I happen to have a longstanding fascination with anthropomorphised animals (incidentally it has been a recurrent motif in much of my own work) so in a way it is not surprising that I would be drawn to ‘Si So Mi’. But even beyond that, there is a sheer strangeness in the imagery: stop motion mice dressed in ornate ceremonial attire, singing and joyfully playing with what appear to be their own intestines, moving around with caterpillar-like pieces of paper.
As with much of the art (as well as things that aren’t art, for that matter) that I am drawn to, I find it difficult to convey with words why I like Zhang Xu Zhan’s film. It simply hits me at a purely aesthetic level, as in it impacts on my senses before I am able to rationally explain what I think about it. Some art that I love does the reverse of that to me, but as far as the work I have been ‘hit’ by at a purely aesthetic level, my appreciation is felt more than it is cerebral or articulatable with words. The instant I encountered ‘Si So Mi’ I felt a surge of excitement. (Then came a subsidiary excitement that art still has the power to do that to me).
Reading a little bit about the work, I learned that it tells a story about the artist’s family’s long held business making traditional paper sculptures that are burned at funerals. That biographical element is enormously pleasing to me — that the strangeness of the world depicted in the film is so far from an affectation (not that I assumed it was affected — on the contrary it gives the exact opposite impression) but instead a first-hand account of experiences and memories related to funerals and watching a mouse die. The sound in the work, which is structured around Si So Mi, a traditional Taiwanese funeral song with roots in German folk music, is perversely sweet and childlike, and to me it sounds like recordings of castrati — crude, grainy and all but impossibly high pitched.
The self-reflexivity of the animated characters and scenery, having been made with the very material being talked about, is beautifully poetic and seems to close a loop in a satisfying way (rather than reductive or clever-clogs). Speaking of which, the work is shown as a loop as well - not incidentally - but rather as a commentary on the circularity of life, the afterlife, and indeed death.
— Eddie Peake, March 2021