Ke Qin’s media art practices have developed a stable interest in how human consciousness shapes and distorts its own reality. In her new video art project, Fission of the Body, presented as part of the Paris exhibition Walking Between Norms and Memory, this inquiry is explored through contemplative meditation. The artwork does not just reveal the mechanisms of memory or the emergence and dissolution of life. Instead, it invites the viewer to become a co-creator, drawing the boundaries of image perception.
The peculiarity of Ke Qin’s artistic method is that it avoids linear narrative. As her previous work, Through the Fissures of Perception, depicted the fluidity and unstable structure of memory through cinematic fragments. In the new artwork, we again encounter the plasticity of images, emerging as if from a rift in existence. In Through the Fissures of Perception, scenes shifted as in a dreamlike flow, transforming the same spatial environment into distinct visual manifestations embodying different states. This artistic technique accentuates that memories are not fixed frames, but mutable sketches, whose sequence may dissolve at any moment. The artist deliberately leaves the viewer the opportunity to reconstruct the further illusion themselves.
In her new work, Fission of the Body, the artist’s favorite technique reaches a new structural level. The concept of “fission” is not just a word. It is a metaphorical act of dismemberment and combination of meanings, forms, and times. Splitting becomes less a visual device and more of a phenomenological approach. Within the video art, we behold how form changes, collapses, and is recreated, yet preserving reminiscence. Likewise, human memory fragments and assembles life experiences into illusory yet emotionally significant constructs. Applying the tree as a universal symbol of life and continuous growth, the artist conveys a metaphor: the changing shape of the tree reflects the transformation of the human psyche.
The video art practice Fission of the Body engages in a constructive dialogue with Ke Qin’s artistic method. The artist does not seek to depict pure illusion, but rather explores the psychological consequences of what is commonly referred to as reality. Video projections, flashes of images, and discontinuities in sequence appear as reflections of her artistic critique. The artist’s visual technique generates uncertainty, which combines both the aesthetic pleasure of observing coloured, shifting images with the intellectual tension of confronting meanings.
In the context of Ke Qin’s extensive oeuvre, this artistic method reflects her attraction to intermediate states, so to speak, those liminal zones that exist between worlds, between cognition and memory, between the body and its reflection. At the same time, her media practice does not dictate definitive interpretation, but it merely indicates points of entry, inviting the viewer into a space of empathy. In this sense, her video art speaks not of a singular body or consciousness, but of a multiplicity of experiential forms. It investigates how the individual and collective unconscious, with its archetypal structures, blends with the present.
Fission of the Body is not simply a video composed of visually compelling scenes and luminous flashes. The artist employed contemporary information and communication technologies to express her conceptual vision. Ke Qin constructed a space in which dissociation became an opportunity for synthesizing form, consciousness, and experience. Here, the mastery is revealed not through formal virtuosity, but through conceptual precision. The artist demonstrates her mastery not formally, but conceptually. She challenges viewers to rethink the fabric of visual experience. In an era when the boundaries between the illusory and the factual are increasingly blurred, Ke Qin’s art acts as a critical mirror, revealing our position in a “fractured” world.
