Egrets, Please stay, Let’s have a heart-to-heart talk (excerpts)
Video37 minXu Tan2021-2022Xu Tan and his team launched "Shunde_Shuntak" (Shunde Study) in 2019. In 2020, a young artist member of the project team took the initiative to leave after the outbreak of the epidemic. Before his death, he revealed his symptoms and a performance art idea about "suicide"……Afterwards, Xu Tan deeply blamed himself for his "ignorance", so he wanted to understand those around him, talk with them.
From 2021 to 2022, he conducted face-to-face interviews with fifteen individuals who exhibited symptoms of depression. Then, from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, was a period when the artist turned to self-inquiry. In 2024, the project was released in three phases in January, April, and May at Top Art Space Qingtian - not as an exhibition nor as a showcase of works.
The third phase is still ongoing, it opens up the project's next round of conversations and connections with everyone in a wider sense of real life. From time to time, Xu Tan invites people who have experience and feelings about a large number of psychological problems and conditions occurring in society in recent years - including symptom sufferers themselves, medical workers (physical or psychological), those who are engaged in social healing activities, and anyone from any field who has a special view and is willing to come and communicate. He looks forward to unexpected conversations, involving cognition and narratives that are not yet included in our experience - the conversation content includes the social phenomenon of such mental/psychological symptoms, that is, the symptom manifestations of the population, research and practice on healing, social causes, from political depression to the judgment and treatment of these symptoms by traditional culture, as well as theological perspectives, etc. These views will also be collected and disseminated to society as a kind of knowledge information.
The artist intends for the project to possess a certain research character –not as a discipline or as therapy but something more socially oriented; for him, it is more important to build a bridge between the so-called normal society and these "symptomatic" people so that they can be more visible and cared for. With this goal in mind, the first phase’s eleven videos of this project have been gradually released on Vimeo. What is shared here in Apartment 1 is an about 37-minute excerpt selected by the artist from the first phase’s videos.