The Metamorphosis

Animation

Computer, ink, xuan paper

Duration: 4'29''

2022

This is an experimental ink animation that took a year to make and consists of 1,178,000 ink works.

In this story, a human being transforms his identity into a flower and a caterpillar in a dream world, and they experience each other's happiness, sadness and fear. By imitating the uncertainty in the ink (nature) with modern techniques, she expresses the arrogance of human beings trying to control nature. She senses that modern lifestyles and survival pressures have led to a greater focus on maximising profits in a short period and an attitude of absolute dominance over other living things "without making mistakes", ignoring the space needed and the freedom to grow naturally.

People create confined spaces of "beautiful" and "conventional" plants and animals, each of which must have its specific function and remove as many variables and unnecessary organisms as possible. At the same time, resilient plants and animals reproduce spontaneously but have unique ecological niches that can thrive and inhabit our wildest lives. The environmental benefits of these "spontaneous ecologies" are not widely recognised but are, in fact, the order and law of nature. Nature can also sense the pressure and anxiety of the human environment as if it were responding to us silently.

She believes telling a story with "you, me, and that" is more accessible.

When the same thing happens simultaneously on the three screens, the state of people, animals, and plants is better presented to the audience. This deepens our thinking about the relationship between nature and us and the plants and animals in nature. At some point, nature can feel the pressure of our present life, and our modern life has also changed much of its growing environment.

Many Chinese landscape paintings have influenced her regarding picture language and composition. Chinese landscape painting is a free-flowing spatial concept with no temporality; it paints the essence of things. This spatial conception is not limited by time and space. It does not go to the time of the day to purposely depict a scene, nor does it have a fixed point of view so that objects observed from different viewpoints can be combined in the painting simultaneously. For example, when summarising the shape of the distant mountains, she drew on the summary of the hills in Magpie Hua Autumn Colours:

• One is a pointed triangular mountain.

• The other is a rounded mountain.

• They are parallel in the same picture, with the essence of nature and the symbolism of eternity.

For the dubbing,

She arranged, played, and edited the music according to the rhythm of the film, adding rock elements to the climax on top of the guqin that is the main body, layering industrial sounds, human voices, and some sounds from nature according to the different moods of the three main lines. These three raw blends express well the state of life in the city today.