San Yuan Li ( 4'24" excerpt)

2003 / video / 40mins

By Ou Ning and Cao Fei

Cameraman: Huang Weikai

San Yuan Li, a collaborative project by Ou Ning, Cao Fei and U-thèque members, is a case study of the typical “village-amidst-the-city” phenomenon in the process of urbanization in Guangzhou. San Yuan Li uses San Yuan Li village as a sample to do researches on the city of Canton. Armed with DV cameras, the crew penetrated San Yuan Li village as a kind of“city flâneurs”, attempting to rethink the debt of history, the confrontation and reconciliation between the process of modernization and the patriarchal clan system and rural community system of Guangzhou, as well as the weird architectures and the humanscape emerging in this village-amidst-the city. All of the images shot are then weaved into a piece of black-and-white imagery poetry.