Yu Yang’s 2017–2023 video, animation, and moving image installation are montaged in this short film. The primary focus of this film centres around the narrative of a male protagonist and his female creator, a writer. In the beginning and concluding segments of the video, Yu incorporated visual content captured via a peephole during his period of isolation within a hotel in a city in the northwestern region of China amidst the coronavirus outbreak in 2022. It is a made-up tale combined with an alternate reality that documents the world. The concept of this model is derived from Yu's proposition in the scholarly article, wherein individuals use interfaces as a means of external communication and self-reflection. This video is a self-reflection journey. For some time now, the author has been researching the self-referential fallacy of images. He frequently used metaphors, keyhole gazes, mirror reflections, doppelgängers, and other techniques and concepts to convey this idea. Yu’s narration in the film aims to elucidate the presence of the other sex buried in the subconscious. The thinker may contain them. We may occasionally believe that something went wrong with our memory. Like Zhuangzi’s dream about the butterfly, we cannot determine whether the person we remember is real or imagined, let alone our actual appearance. As a result, we can be both not and yet fully ourselves.
* Statement of Copyright:
Yu Yang holds exclusive ownership of this work's rotoscoping animation and script creation rights. And he is the main producer of the feature film project. His friend Yili Zhang, who provided (partial) financial support and photographic expertise for the feature film part, owns a portion of the copyright for the video. Moreover, another friend of Yu's, Yike Jia, contributed his original music voluntarily; therefore, he is entitled to a portion of the copyright.
