Prisoners Floating in the Air

 

Yunda Sun

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In the spring of 2020, I was looking through journals of project proposals and there was one written down in 2017 about the use of cyanotypes to make videos. It was never tested due to the lack of access to equipment. The project was forgotten about for a while. It just so happened that after coming to Alfred, all the equipment needed existed here so hence the first tests began. After completing the first test video using the Cyanotype process, the experiments were gradually expanded with the other printing processes. These included: screen printing, laser-cut woodblock prints, digital printing, laser printing, and photopolymer gravures. The choice of paper also ranged from the most basic drawing papers, newsprint to an extensive variety of different handmade Xuan papers including Chinese tea packing paper, Chinese calligraphy paper for writing Chinese New Year messages and couplets, and even papers for children to practice their characters. Although the overall process of making the videos was tedious and labor-intensive, enjoyment was amplified by the process of connecting traditional, handcrafted techniques with digital, mechanized equipment and making moving images from processes that had been producing static images. After the process, when the video is finally played in 8K resolution, the video will have the same texture and quality as all the paper and processes that have brought paintings and prints to the screen, and the viewer will be able to see all the local details as close to the screen as when watching paintings and prints.

 

When the video was being printed on paper, light and shadow were trapped on it and into it creating a dilemma. This exasperated the quandary that included my confusion about the future as a young artist becoming a bystander with my peers, in a fast-moving society while being a foreign student trapped between China and the United States during the 2020 pandemic. We are not only trapped in the same erratic policies like ping pong balls; we are also like prisoners tied to paper kites floating in the sky, our seemingly free lives are also bound by the rules of society’s expectations and acquiescence carried by paper. There is always a way out of the dilemma, and the prisoners and kites in the air also will eventually fall, but until we know the result, it will always be unknown where our lives will float with the paper.

 

Dark clouds float in the fibers.

Cyan burns in the water.

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Migration and Ping pong

Traversing between paper and border

Misgurnus and crowds

Struggling to survive and dream

 

Screaming, smoking, pink sand

 

People and subways

Who can run faster

Words and people

Who can go farther