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
I started from a historical interval — Zhu Ying and Kang Tai, envoys of Wu, reaching Funan and meeting emissaries from India — and addressed it to a second person, a traveller who has not yet set out. The route runs from old geographies toward a single strange image, a tropical rainforest with a scanned, headless portrait, and on to the word Sannyasi, the one who has left home. The animation never rebuilds a continuous historical road; it turns these fragments into 3D landscapes, portraits, fields of light and remembered directions, so that travelling is felt as a chain of translation rather than a line on a map.
Exhibitions
- 2022, Apocalypse of Yesterday, Ginkgo Space, Beijing, China
Links / references
- TrueArt - Apocalypse of Yesterday External exhibition record for Apocalypse of Yesterday at Ginkgo Space.
- Palais de Tokyo - La Friche #5 Public screening programme listing Anagāriya by Guangli Liu.