PERFECT PEARL

Perfect Pearl is a poetic multimedia project about chasing love and the friction between dream and hard reality. ‘The picture perfect life’. https://www.tarafallaux.com/the-perfect-pearl

Perfect Pearl is a poetic multimedia project about chasing love and the friction between dream and hard reality. ‘The picture perfect life’.

The main subject is about chasing love or ‘the concept of love’ seen from a female perspective. What we desire or what we think we should desire. The story touches on existential solitude, the makeability of life and fleeting online personalities; how to emancipate and to find our own identity amidst the (lonely) crowd. Despite its cultural definitions and particularities, love is a universal desire that allowed me to identify with these Chinese women in their early twenties. My friendships resulted in a collaboration where I interweave my own poetic observations with the thoughts and feelings of my young Chinese friends. Pursuing your ‘perfect future dream’ feels like a dangerous game. Won't you always be disappointed if you keep chasing the ‘perfect picture’? How each individual shapes his life and expresses her existence is a source of lasting fascination for me.

I started the project Perfect Pearl in 2018 during an Artist in Residence period in China. I came in contact with female students through Xiamen University. We talked about their loneliness, desires and doubts about relationships. Marrying or not marrying. Because many girls I befriended spoke little English, we used WeChat 'translate'. (WeChat is a popular messaging app in China; a combination of Twitter and Facebook called ‘Moments') In the book PERFECT PEARL I have collected personal texts that I found on 'Moments' or that they sent me directly.

In the three-channel film MOBILE HOME (20 min) i collected personal mobile phone videos from 8 young women in different Chinese cities. The whole production was done through WeChat. I made suggestions to film their most common daily life routines which they interpreted in their own way. After collecting all the videos I edited them from dusk till dawn in a three channel vertical installation.

In the film ‘I write this letter in bed’ (9 min) we hear my friend Rocy reading a love letter she wrote. Should she get married or not? We see impressions of metropolitan life in Xiamen, China – panoramas of the immensity of its infrastructure (highways, traffic jams) and the hollowness of ‘this leap forward’ as celebrated in neon-lit karaoke bars. From the voice-over, we learn that Rocy dreams of being a ‘perfect woman’ but we also hear her saying: “Maybe I am not confident enough. Believing that the law is more binding than love.”

Film installation, photography and an artist book. Private links to the films can be shared upon request.

www.tarafallaux.com