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 Installation filmed on and around Mount Lu, China. In 1895, the British missionary Edward Selby Little acquired a 999-year land deed on this mountain and built a Western enclave he named Kuling. Across the two screens, images of the same mountain are placed side by side, each produced by a different technology of looking: Shen Zhou’s 1467 ink painting of a hermit’s utopia; Edward’s surveyor’s geometry; the Western photographer’s archive; the AI-generated image, with its “god’s view.” I appear in the work as a performer, walking the mountain where I grew up while occupying viewing positions that were never mine.

The Foreign Land belongs to MOAT (Ministry of Artificial Truth), an ongoing fictional institution through which I examine how technologies of image-production inherit and redistribute the power to define what counts as real. Here, the investigation examines 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.