DREAM
Tiantian Qiu’s practice follows a surrealist tradition, making use of mixed media including sculpture, photography and video. Her work often addresses an interior world, with projects responding to loneliness, and to death.
Dream explores the correlation between the mental stress of real life and the dream world, hoping to achieve artistic healing through photography. As Qiu’s life situation changes, so does her conception of dreams, which is why the work was split into two parts. The first part is moving images, in which she records her dream stories in the form of videos. The cross-media creation of sculpture and photography gives the works a more surrealist absurdity and dreaminess. The second part is still images, discussing the effect of dreams on herself through the search for contradictions and balance between things. Her practice is more of an examination and exploration of the self.
This work is my expression of the dream world as a vehicle to criticize the pollution of the living environment and the waste of natural resources by human beings. In this dream story, I have created a race of people called the Forest Snail Man, who are persecuted by mankind, but who have been 'promoted' by mankind to become human gods. The existence of the Forest Snail Man is the ludicrous result of man's endless demands on the natural environment, and the end of the Forest Snail Man as god is a satire of the ridiculous situation of mankind's destruction through the depletion of resources.
