Fang Lu’s silent film Lost Seconds is a special edition created from the artist’s seven channel video installation Cinema (2013). Lost Seconds explores the staged and constructed nature of the contemporary self and critically examines what society and the individual see and want to portray. What first appears like a regular self-choreographed performance reveals itself as a disturbing portrait of the female persona in a world dominated by attributes like attractiveness, quickly tipping into anxiety and narcissism, the artist having referred to Lost Seconds as a “melancholic portrait”.

The work elevates the individual relationship with its socio-political environment to a recognisable and appealing set of behavioural actions of self-awareness and self-inflicted anguish. It is staged in the fashion of creating a self-image in the politically guarded societal arena of surveillance and social networks. In this media orientated process of constructing a self-image, one experiences the loss of one’s authenticity and identity over time.

The focal point of the work the female protagonist sitting in the audience with minimal movement and action. The character is both the actress and director as she simultaneously consumes and produces the image. The ways in which the images are produced no longer relies on technology, as the technology is not physically apparent in the scene. All that remains is the artists’ social condition and melancholic state that is ever-present in contemporary China, hovering in between a distant historical past and an approaching future. The artwork belongs to the Déjà Vu collection curated by LEAP LABS.

Fang Lu lives and works in Beijing.