- Title: La Town
- Creator: Cao Fei
- Music: Dickson Dee
- Date Created: 2014
- Rights: Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing, Photo by Alessandra Chemollo; Courtesy: la Biennale di Venezia
- Medium: HD video, color, sound, (42’)
At a place called the "Night Museum", open only after dusk, various artifacts about "darkness" are on display. There is the American horror film "30 Days of Night", Chinese artist Chu Yun's installation "Constellation", and surprisingly, there is even the iPad app game for "The Godfather." The current exhibition is about La Town.
Everyone has heard the myth of La Town. The story first appeared in Europe, but after traveling through a space-time wormhole, reappeared in Asia and Southeast Asia. It was last seen near the ocean bordering the Eurasian tectonic plate, vanishing in its midst as if a mirage.La Town, struck by unknown disaster - where without sunlight, time froze. Polar night was all encompassing, so the few instances of white nights have been momentously recorded in the town's history. Yet, through the drifting of time and space, various countries have rewritten La Town’s history, and details have been neglected. Now, the story of the small town’s past - love affairs, politics, life, demons and disasters - have all been sealed beneath the museum’s vitrines, the historical “specimens” becoming an authoritative but limited interpretation of this town’s history.
Night town; is there something happening? What kind of story does it carry? What forces caused such distortions in space and time?
Visitors quietly wander between the displays. This is just the first exhibit of the summer; there will be more interesting shows to come
At this moment, from the cinema screen of the “Night Museum” drifts a few lines of dialogue:
The Stranger: “Bar the windows. Try to hide. They’re coming.”
Eben Olemaun: “They? Who are they?”