Green Hair Monsters; Pearls

For Fan Xi, books are artistic creations, not simply records of created works. In this case, Green Hair Monsters and Pearls are video works rather than bodies of photography, thus introduced into a book format as still images, the approach to conveying narrative necessarily shifts. Fan Xi’s premise here begins from a month spent on the Malaysian island of Pulau Dinawan in 2019. In book form, each of the two video works that resulted from the sojourn is transposed into a separate volume, of a sequence and texture intended to evoke a sensual association with the world that the original videos explore. From the lives of local workers, to the dense mazes of jungle vegetation and open stretches of water, Fan Xi conjures the local environment through glimpses of light and form that juggle between the meditative and the threatening, harmony and harm. All those fragile human emotions that produces belief in gods and spirits, deftly captured here.