Anagāriya begins from a historical interval: Zhu Ying and Kang Tai, envoys of the Wu kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period, travelled to Funan and encountered emissaries from India. Rather than treating this record as a stable illustration of the past, the animation lets it return as a memory addressed to “you”, a future traveller who has not yet arrived.
Portraits, journeys, and the figure of the renunciant become unstable carriers of cultural transmission. Distance is no longer only geographical; it is produced by language, belief, translation, and the image itself. The work keeps the ambiguity of these fragments, allowing the one who has left home to appear as both historical figure and drifting projection.
Process notes
The 2020-01 script draft gathers ancient geography, Zhu Ying and Kang Tai’s mission to Funan, the encounter with envoys from India, and later Buddhist travel narratives into a second-person address. Its notes move from route descriptions to a “tropical rainforest - scanned headless portrait” scene, then to the word Sannyasi, the one who has left home. The animation does not reconstruct a continuous historical route. It turns these fragments into 3D landscapes, portraits, light fields, and remembered directions, so that travel is felt as a chain of translation rather than a line on a map.
Exhibitions
- 2022, Apocalypse of Yesterday, Ginkgo Space, Beijing, China