NOWNESS presents Out of Blueprints, a new online exhibition of moving image work on the occasion of Cao Fei’s solo exhibition, Blueprints, at the Serpentine Galleries, which has been temporarily closed in response to the global spread of COVID-19. In partnership with the Serpentine Galleries and K11 Art Foundation, this new program illustrates how artists and institutions have turned closure into creation, and adversity into innovation, as each week an East Asia-based practitioner releases a moving image work on NOWNESS.

Smoke and Fire is a revolving door of symbols and reenactments told through the story of a man who occupies multiple physical realms. In one reality, he is in a movie prop warehouse where he projects himself into tales taken from Chinese legends he has been reading. In another, he is a manual laborer returning to his small hometown in northeast China.

Wang Tuo is a Beijing-based multimedia artist who created Smoke and Fire as a thematic exploration of the ‘Zhang Koukou revenge killing’—an infamous triple homicide carried out in 2018 by a man in Shaanxi Province, China who waited over two decades to avenge his mother’s murder.

The artist creates a sense of foreboding by layering his narrative with ghost stories and sinister music that foreshadows the violent murder the worker-protagonist eventually commits on a dusty track in an empty cornfield; revealing that his activities in the warehouse and his hometown before were just a rehearsal for this gruesome, final act.

Wang Tuo's film mingles personal experience and cultural myth with trauma to construct an overlapping world of multiple identities that transcend time and place.

Smoke and Fire (2018)
Single channel 4K video (color, sound)  31’18”

Actor: Dong Ming
Cinematographer: Li Hang’an
Photographer: Li Hang’an, Hou Xiaohang
Composer: Li Zong
Production Assistant: Zhang Baojian, He Yinhan
Colorist: Xu Deya
Camera Operator: Zhang Jingxiong