Sarah MORRIS

At Media City Seoul 2010

Beijing (2008)

35 mm/HD video, 84 min 47 sec

Seoul Museum of Art, Gallery 1-A

Artist Profile

Born 1967; Lives and works in New York

Sarah Morris’s videos and paintings investigate psychological effects in the contemporary urban environment and their political meanings, as encoded in architecture. This is particularly evident in a series of paintings featuring urban structures, including those of New York and Los Angeles. The political, social, and cultural aspects of these cities clearly manifest the artist’s intention to expose the duality of cities by revealing their surfaces and their depths.

Beijing is an 84-minute film about the Chinese capital in 2008 around the time of the Summer Olympic Games. This film questions the immense power of the turbo-capitalism triggered by the Olympic Games, an international mega-event in which massive capital and high technology were applied to a degree of unprecedented intensity, and the meanings underlying this phenomenon. This video shows fragments of contemporary China and traces of the capitalism that has infiltrated China—such as shopping centers and imported cars, which no longer remind us of the old China, the representative of socialism—alternated with scenes from the Olympic Games, questioning the agency that is in control of this spectacular power.