The Foreign Land

Part of: The Kuling Project · MOAT, Ministry of Artificial Truth Department of Imaging (MOAT/IM/004)

Dual-channel video installation 2025 color, sound, 13 min
AI image generation: ChatGPT, Runway — used to reproduce the ‘god’s view’ of the mountain as it is rendered by generative systems.

沈周. *廬山高 (Lofty Mount Lu)*. 明憲宗成化二年（1467）. 軸. 故畫000884N000000000. 國立故宮博物院數字典藏, 台北. Accessed May 2, 2026. https://digitalarchive.npm.gov.tw/Collection/Detail/3593?dep=P.

*Taking a Photograph, Kuling (牯岭)*. Ca. 1910–1920. Black and white photograph. Billie Love Historical Collection, BL03-077. Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol. Accessed May 2, 2026. https://hpcbristol.net/visual/BL03-077.

The Foreign Land is a dual-channel video work filmed on and around Mount Lu, China. Across the two screens, images of the same mountain are placed side by side and each produced by a different technology of looking.

I appear in the work as a performer, walking the mountain while occupying viewing positions that were never mine: the Western photographer’s, the drone’s, the AI’s “god’s view.”

The work extends the same investigation MOAT will formalize at institutional scale: how different technologies of image-production inherit and redistribute the power to define what counts as real. Here, the investigation is conducted through the concrete case of a single mountain that has been represented, for more than a century, by everyone except the people who lived on it.