WORK / LIVE 干活 Tian Dongliang 田栋梁

Despite the bricking-up and emptying of many shops on Jianchang Hutong, Arrow Factory carried on, presenting I’m Sorry, a video work by Tian Dongliang 田栋梁 and the Social Sensibility Institute. The window frame of the previous project, Yang Zhenzhong’s Fences, was kept, with clear glass replacing the mirror, turning the façade into a portal onto Tian’s tenacious video performance.

Arms raised and fists clenched, Tian re-enacts a widely shared news image of a Syrian toddler who raised her hands in fear, believing the photographer’s camera was a weapon pointed at her. He holds the pose as long as he can bear, then drops his arms in defeat and walks away.

The title expresses a need for atonement. Tian had a turbulent childhood: at six, he remembers, his relatives were involved in loan-sharking, and one afternoon he came home from school to find the house stripped of everything, the people responsible nowhere to be found. Years of moving followed – unfamiliar towns, many schools, odd jobs. From these experiences he developed a particular interest in, and knowledge of, the craft of scams; he analyses methods of deception, and what he learns shapes his complex, layered view of the world. His re-enactment of surrender speaks of a helplessness acknowledged on all sides.

Tian Dongliang (born 1990, Henan province) was then in his first year at Bernard Controls, as a machine operator on the factory floor.

Text adapted from the Arrow Factory introduction.