Zhou Xiaohu, Crowd Around, 2003–04
Video installation, dimensions variable, video: 11 min 1 sec
Courtesy the David and Indrė Roberts Collection
Where were you when you first saw that image of a plane flying straight into the side of the World Trade Center North Tower? Most of us do not need long to remember the answer. There are certain defining moments in recent Western history — 'one small step for man…,' JFK’s assassination, the fall of the Berlin wall — that have been etched well and truly into the collective imagination. These are moments where personal memories and global history fuse together more than usual, in part due to the rapid speed of image circulation that has come to define our current Information Age.
Zhou Xiaohu has been dubbed a 'pioneer of video animation in China' and has been using computers and game software as his main artistic tools since the late-90s.¹ His claymation Crowd Around deals directly with image circulation and consumption in ten short ‘newsreel’ scenes, the third of which depicts 9/11. In them, identical crowds of stop-motion clay figurines bear witness to a host of generally unseemly incidents — an assassination, electrocution, high stakes boxing competition, plane hijack, court ruling and so on. The subject and object characters are the only ones that he assigns different formal and facial characteristics to, making them stand out against the ubiquitous but anonymous mass, the us in an ‘us versus them’.
1 Exhibition guide, 'The Real Thing: Zhou Xiaohu born 1960'. Available at www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/real-thing-contemporary-art-china/real-thing-exhibition-guide-12 Last accessed 5 April 2020
Xiaohu’s simple thin rectangle blocks are immediately recognisable as the Twin Towers, as they collapse into a cloud of debris made of squished clay, revealing fingerprint moulds. The distilled forms pack a punch in effectiveness, leaving no question to what it is you are witnessing. The event is reiterated by being rewound and replayed on a television set, with this framing enhancing the immediate familiarity. This repetition was how these low-res, shaky hand-cam frames were zapped across the world, into our homes, consciousness and history books. Their endless circulation started first through the news cycle, before the images resurfaced in a morphed form as commemorative art and architecture, in literature, cinema, narrative documentary or theatre.
In September 2001 the Information Age was arguably still in its infancy, this being a time before Web 2.0 and sophisticated smartphones. The widespread access to often handheld technology we are used to now has provided even more routes for images to become collective symbols. At lighting speed they crop up and circulate across the web, as bootlegs, screenshots, forwarded messages, memes. These are all versions of what Hito Steyerl has defined ‘poor images’, 'a copy in motion.'²
2 Hito Steyerl, 'In Defense of the Poor Image', e-flux journal #10, November 2009. Available online, last accessed 5 April 2020
Poor images have significant political currency, especially when considering the sheer amount of people that facilitate their high-volume consumption and distribution. As Steyerl notes; 'altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction'.3 Xiaohu works with the clay equivalent of a low-res copy, DIY depictions in simple shapes where his hand-held camera swoops over the studio sets as he simulates the movement of jerky phone recordings. A crafty remake of broadcast media and popular culture, layered with complex foley and sound design, his scenes have moments of intensity, are laced with a sense of dark humour and provide eleven minutes of escapism into an outside world now only consumable via screens.
3 Ibid.
