Related stories

The Stone Goat of Western Xia 2006 'Arts from Our Land' Competition The New Literature Group The Cultural Connection A Monthly take on Laowai Life in the big city The Tibet Code

The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim

Donning the orange robe of a Shaolin monk, British artist David Blandy walks a fine line between fantasy and reality in The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim now on exhibit until April 15 at the Platform China 798 Project Space. The exhibit consists of a series of video performances filmed as he made his pilgrimage. Barefoot, he trekked through the undergrowth of a Surrey park as a hermit, through the wide-open roads of the American landscape, and through the streets of New York City in pursuit of “soul.” Blandy’s search for hip-hop music establishments in New York highlights his deep interest in the genre and popular culture in general.

The footage of the Shaolin-robed Blandy with walking stick in hand is interspersed with segments taken from such nostalgic films as Princess Mononoke and such television programs as Kung Fu. With a little of David Carradine’s familiar visage here and there, Blandy attempts to document his strange journey by integrating his experiences in the real world with those that occur in his imagination. Supplementing his video pieces, copies of Blandy’s journal, which cover one portion of his trek, are available in comic book form, complete with dialogue bubbles translated into Chinese. The video installation is also accompanied by Chinese subtitles.

Through his performance pieces, Blandy aims to tackle his “problematic relationship” with popular culture, with his pilgrimage serving as a symbolic search for his own cultural identity in today’s ever perplexing, modern world. While Blandy’s journey appears meaningful, the Pilgrim pieces also appear to be laced with more humour than meaning, but the humour is refreshing and succeeds in capturing the amusing relationship between our somewhat straight-laced realities and our oddly constructed worlds of fantasy. With his black-rimmed glasses and shaggy mop top, Blandy has created performance art that is a reflection of himself: youthful, comical, and perpetually wandering.