Brooklyn Has No Mountain
Single-channel video, 3’03’’
2024

Brooklyn Has No Mountain begins with family footage of a child's first birthday dinner in his hometown, Jinmen, China, decades before he would migrate alone to Brooklyn. When interviewed years later about his memories of migration, the child in the video, now an adult, drew a valley with mountains obstructing his view of the path behind him. “I don't see, and maybe I don't wanna see.”

The work visualizes this peculiar psychological condition of migration, reconstructing this valley in 3D and spreading frames from the footage across the slopes of an impossible canyon. As the rendered landscape takes over the screen, the original recording drifts in and out of view. What once unfolded as a few minutes of recorded time now stretches across a terrain, where the past is encountered through physical distances, the yearning for return, precipitous outcrops and obstructed views rather than the neat sequence of events. As the camera travels, the past appears both as the ground of his journey and as the very things that stand between him and a clear view of the way back.

Music excerpt from Hallelu Ya Hallelu Me by Okay Kaya.

Frame atlas, extracted from Fangzheng Zhu’s family footage (1995).