Blue was originally made for Scratch Night, just one day after my birthday — it was a gift, a confession, and probably the most intimate work I have ever made, with my most familiar mediums: visual, sound, and text. The piece was self-directed; it was later presented at the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt launch at Woolwich Works.

The footage came from the first three rolls of Super 8 I bought to test my camera in different lighting conditions — coincidentally, those rolls captured some fractures of my daily life. The duality of Chinese identity, I think, is that from the Cultural Revolution through to economic reform, time, material, life… everything, with billions of lives, has been accelerating inside a vacuum, dramatically collapsing to nothing and then bursting into everything. A small rendezvous in the market can turn into a skyscraper in a blink. The longing, the desperation, to remember all the ashes and dust caught up in that acceleration — to let images do the recording — made the sense of seeing the priority. Naturally, iPhone and Super 8 became my main visual hosts. Derek Jarman was a huge influence too; Blue (1993) made me realise that film could be like this.

On self-as-material, autobiography, autobiofiction — I think they differ only in how authentic, or, in more neutral terms, how directly they express themselves. The fiction in the first part of the video felt more 'real' than the fact. After the performance, people came up to congratulate me on my 'acting', and I was extremely confused — because to me, acting means to pretend, to mask yourself; yet when I had my real emotions and my real self on the stage, people read it as acting. That question stayed with me, and led me into the later research on perception and perspectives.