Ulysses
Cao Shu / China / 2017 / 11 min / Colour
Among snow-capped mountains, perhaps born of fantasy, the author's imagination moves as in a dream, reconnecting the threads of a lost memory, re-emerged from the pages of an old school diary: a person once known, now forgotten. Rereading passages of that rediscovered diary, the gaze turns inwards, trying to return a shape, a face, to an absence. But the memory is weak, the memory escapes. In an emptied and cold inner landscape, images, relics and fetishes of a life long past re-emerge, silent and mysterious, threatening in their impossibility to compose themselves in a coherent memory. In a single sequence, investigating the ductile possibilities of digital graphics, Cao Shu traces a painful topography of memory: a desolate land - owing to Surrealist and Jungian aesthetics - in which each object is a mute enigma, without solution.
Cao Shu
Cao Shu lives and works mainly in Hangzhou. He graduated in New Media Art from the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts (CAA) in Hangzhou, where he has been teaching since 2012. His works, animations and installations have received international recognition and are exhibited in various galleries in China, Australia and Israel.
Credits
Subject Cao ShuScreenplay Cao ShuCinematography Cao ShuSound Wang ChenfeiEditing Cao ShuMusic Wang ChenfeiMain cast Zhu NanouProduction company Cao Shu Studio