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Critical Practice

Fang-Yi Cheng

Fang-Yi Cheng was born in Taiwan. She studied Communication for her BA. The experience deepened her knowledge of Sociology and developed her current research and practice.  

Contact

@tiffanytiffyfanny

Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Critical Practice

Fang-Yi Cheng works with moving images and installations. She currently explores the themes of boredom, failure, and time, especially the boredom and the sense of time in contemporary society. In a society of speed culture and the prosperity of capitalism, failure and boredom are often misunderstood and ignored. She thinks it is therefore necessary to explore and further research on such subjects. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, she also displays a sense of emptiness, slowness and calmness in her work. Fang-Yi Cheng uses a lot of repetitive and durational elements in her work as well. 

Fang-Yi Cheng is interested in making videos that “cannot be watched entirely”. Her recent work includes creating the experience of “immersing in complete boredom” and “losing the sense of time”. 

A random second every minute for an hour
A random second every minute for an hour is a video work particularly suitable for being viewed on the screen. The completely black video looks like the screen is turned off, deliberately creating a work that does not have a strong presence, like a semi-finished, failed, non-exist video. It is only when the white image flashes for one second can the viewers feel the dynamic and the exact sense of time. However, since the flash appears randomly, viewers lose their sense of time easily.

Medium:

Single channel video

Size:

1 hour
boredomdurationnothingnesstime
Blanks
Blanks is an installation assembled from one hundred videos: Blank 1 is a blank video with the length of one second, Blank 2 is a two second blank video, Blank 3 is a three second blank video... to Blank 100, a 100 second blank video, and these videos are played sequentially in loop.
In the process of viewing, it is easy to lose the sense of time, as it is hard to know exactly which part is being viewed. If viewers do not watch carefully (or long enough), it may even be regarded as a white still image.

Medium:

Single channel video installation

Size:

1 hour 24 minutes 44 seconds
Video documentation of Short films
Short films is an installation composed by 3 videos that are all 1 second. The sense of time is blurred and lost under repetition, resulting in a state very similar to “a long film that cannot be fully watched” or even eternal. Since the beginning and ending of watching is controlled by the viewer, every viewer sees the same content, but also completely different. The repetition makes each viewing experience complete and incomplete.
There are subtitles such as "This is a very short film, you can watch it", “Repetition is boring", "Colour changes slightly", giving boring video commentaries, as if everything is just there, that there is no need to think more.

Medium:

3-channel video installation

Size:

1 second/ 1 second/ 1 second (on loop)

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