Connecting people through art 

On 24 November, the Han Nefkens Foundation presented, at MACBA’s Convent dels Àngels Auditorium, the video "Blue and Red" (2014) by the Chinese artist Zhou Tao (Guangzhou, 1976), winner of the first Han Nefkens – BACC Award for Contempory Art , presented by the Foundation in Bangkok on January 2014.

The film was shot during a turbulent period in the political life of Thailand: a time with violent confrontations between anti-government demonstrators and the police, a situation that could be compared with a civil war. But Zhou Tao’s nal movie is not a political or social documentary, but rather a more poetical re ection about our everyday reality in general. He combines in Blue and Redin fact two completely opposite situations: the crowded chaos he experienced in Bangkok and contemplative, quiet images of the cities, the life and the nature recorded in China.

Thus, by editing his lm he creates a ux, a kind of third, new reality. The artist mixed up during his stay with the antigovernment protestors rebelling all night in Bangkok’s main squares, risking his life and even getting shot by the police. These politically charged images are mixed by the artist in its nal edition with poetical shots of nature’s calm beauty. This way the artist tries to express the strong emotional uctuations he experiences in the lmmaking process and how it pushes him to create a kind of ‘dual reality’. The stories he creates exist simultaneously in reality, as do the landscapes and characters that are his protagonists.