Shot Through Erika Tan 2008 16 mins single channel DVD

"In our dreamworld, is not China precisely this privileged site of space? In our traditional imagery, the Chinese culture is the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events, most attached to the pure delineation of space; we think of it as a civilization of dikes and dams beneath the eternal face of the sky; we see it, spread and frozen, over the entire surface of a continent surrounded by walls." Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1973
Shot Through is part of a recent series of works on 'journeys'. These video works are a returning to the material and otherwise, of past and multiple journeys to China, taken by the artist, friends, family and others. Exercising an archaeological ambition, Tan carefully unearths, re-traces, and assembles a range of memories, thoughts, subjective interpretations and wild speculations that eventually become the means through which a personal psycho-geography of 'China' is developed. From the writings of Sontag, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault and Barthes and from the memories and accounts of family members, the work seeks to look at the production of China, through and with difference, from a distance.