Karibu Islands: Somewhere Between Fact and

Fiction

    IF time flowed backwards, what kind of life would you choose? Perhaps you’ve never thought about it. Visual artist Zheng Bo presents this fantasy in his digital video and text entitled Karibu Islands.

       Time goes by in reverse in the Karibu Islands. Life starts at enfeebled old age; the body gradually grows stronger until it’s time to start work – at retirement age – and life continues on its backward course through middle-age to youth, when work stops and study begins, sliding back further to the fun and games of childhood, toddlerhood and eventually infancy and the mother’s care.

      Have you ever imagined life this way? Or perhaps what it would be like if President Kennedy’s life had resumed after his assassination attempt and he was alive, well and in the bosom of his family? Or if the Sakyamuni Buddha had returned to temporal life and his family? Or what would happen if a newborn child were to return to its mother’s womb?

      Zheng uses backwards-running footage from classic films to set fantastic scenarios before his audiences based on reversed time and space, his idea being to shock them out of their habitual, trammeled train of mainstream thought. “I began with two main ideas: One is anti-modernity, the other is my belief that a video portrayal of a society that works according to reverse time and space acts as a mirror, prompting observation and analysis of actual society. Most important, it might make people think about its implications. For example, in reverse time and space, companies are not profit-making institutions but instead pay out cash to the people who are not consumers but suppliers of merchandise. This backward metaphor extends to manufacturing industries, which instead of producing goods transform them into raw materials.” Zheng’s Karibu Islands video installation is actually a critique of China’s rapid modernization and the Chinese people’s infatuation with all things materialistic.

      Zheng is one of a new generation of Chinese artists that pursues bold new media to express their explanation of the country’s economic prosperity and to portray a pluralistic Chinese society. As Brian Wallace, founder of the seminal Red Gate Gallery and connoisseur of Chinese contemporary art, said, “Young Chinese artists have the confidence to expound on the brand-new China.”

     Zheng’s Karibu Islands video installation won the Juror’s Choice Award in mid-October 2008 at the inaugural Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize organized by the Singapore Art Museum and sponsored by the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation. The purpose of the award is to develop and promote contemporary visual art in the Asia-Pacific region. Those that win it are artists whose works display significant advances in this art medium.

      The Korean digital art curator Wonil Rhee, one of the panel of judges at the Signature Art Prize, speaks highly of Zheng’s work and digital vision, and how Zheng brings Eastern and Western elements together in this fascinating “time reversal” mode of expression.

     Zheng’s comment: “I think people could have an even happier life in reverse time and space.”

     The reverse time and space concept of love certainly merits consideration. Zheng’s portrayal of Karibu Islands love is one in which everyone is born with a life partner with whom to spend the days as both grow healthier and stronger. After a few decades everyone is young and passion blooms, but later still amicably part because emotional love is no longer re levant. Zheng hopes that being made to think of love this way might make people place more value on prospective partners’ characters and minds rather than focusing solely on physical beauty.

     Some members of the audience feel uncomfortable watching this imaginary reversal of life, simply because its backward-moving imagery is too much at odds with what their brain expects. Others find the portrayed reversals, such as a baby returning to the womb, offensive, from an ethical standpoint; others still regard the portrayal of Buddha returning to secular life as blasphemous.

    “Perhaps because Zheng is gay, the idea of a life in reverse seems to him more equitable and joyful, because when love is discrete from procreation and all its responsibilities, and from gender too, it is a truly pure emotion,” was art critic Cheng Zhanwei’s comment.

      While the follow-up video installation, Karibu Islands III, was being shot, Zheng invited various groups of people, including male and female gays, bisexuals and heterosexuals, to participate. Zheng so described the scenario: “We linked time reversal with sexual preference, and asked participants to express and discuss their opinions on topics such as gays, gay marriage, adoption, personal success and societal development.”

      After five rounds of discussions, he found that heterosexuals had the shortest attention span as regards either discussion or flights of imagination. “As gays are in a minority they are more inclined to get together and form groups. As many are also disenchanted with real life they spend much of their waking life drifting off into daydreams, so the concept of time reversal is easy for them to grasp. But as there are few disparities between heterosexual imagination and real life, the concept of time and life reversal is beyond their imaginative scope,” Zheng remarked.

      In his capacity of artist and researcher, Zheng has done his utmost to prove that when the conventional system is completely reversed, the concepts of ambition and the pursuit of fame and wealth and all the associated trammels disappear. Yet the imaginary Karibu Islands do have a kind of social code and behavioral standard. In one scene of the video a girl who has lived on the islands for six months reads out a letter she has written to her family. She says: “You may think that I’m a bit lazy and lack motivation. But people here also say that I’m a bit greedy as well as lacking in motivation.” People who have lived on the islands but fail to adapt after three days to time reversal are diagnosed with Time Split Syndrome and sent for treatment.

      “The video has given audiences something new to discuss and argue about. Although imperfect, it has at least fulfilled my original expectation of making people think,” Zheng concluded. He actually refers to Karibu Islands as an imagination game.