Single-channel video, colour, sound, loop.

5 editions, 1 AP.

Description

Cardio contemplates the state of being alive: the scenes of a man skipping rope maximising his respiratory system’s capacity are interwoven with those of a lived home space, whose absent owner’s presence is still apparent through animated objects. Dressed in a green chroma-keyed suit, the rope-skipping man remains as himself whereas his background is the element that keeps changing, ironically. As he seamlessly traverses different rooms in the house carrying out his athletic activity, his screen time is interrupted by the laundry cuts. The same rhetoric from Eight Horses Chasing the Wind is deployed again as the sporting body is fused with a domestic chore. The thwacks – born out of the steady smacking of the rope on the floor – call for an eerie anticipation of an end as if the living body and the lived space will be out of breath and soon out of life.

The television transmission of sports events requires multiple cameras with several fixed cameras in addition to mobile ones helping the audience establish their main, static point of view. Though the audience’s viewpoints will alternate all the time, they always find themselves bouncing back to this main perspective as a dual point of arrival and departure. Thanks to technological abundance – that is the advanced visual and sonic recording equipment – the audience of televised sports is said to have a more comprehensive experience of the event as compared to that of the real-life spectator. The zooming in and zooming out of the camera, the replay of an action usually at its normal speed, and then in slow motion helps the audience get closer than ever to every crevice of the game. Sounds from the field are thoroughly captured – whether it is the cheering of the crowd or a faint thump – ambiance noise always permeates through. Inevitably, the audience exists in the here-and-now of the event without them even being physically present. The spatiality of the sports field bleeds into the home and vice versa.

Description by curator Linh Lê excerpted from "Soon The Time Will Come" Exhibition Catalog, 2023, p.5