This slow-motion video creates a visual and mimetic play between Karl Blossfeldt's photographs and collected Chinese woven hand fans mainly bought on Taobao. In each sequence, a different hand fan flips a page of an enlarged Blossfeldt photo book through induced airflow, allowing viewers to follow the overlapping shapes, patterns, and colors. The constant flow of repetitive movements induces a hypnotic state.
The title's "after" refers to a 2016 gift-giving performance where these same hand fans were displayed on a long table and distributed to the audience. As such, After the Gift - Blossfeldt's Fan serves as an index of those distributed gifts while speculating on the "after-life" of the gift that binds giver and receiver across time and space.
During his 2016 Beijing artist residency, I opened a 2014 Karl Blossfeldt Taschen edition bearing the handwritten dedication "For Max from Shuyu." While residencies function as gifts with underlying dependencies and reciprocity expectations, they also reveal an economy where artists temporarily relocate, forging connections that persist across future returns and settlements
