About I Am the People

In 2019, I began the “I Am the People” Project, a sub-project of the “Assembly Line Project,” which involves interviews of people from various professions or social groups. Since 2010, when I first began the Assembly Line Project, I have visited, conducted interviews and taken footage of over 200 different kinds of factories. In the process of meeting all of these people, I found that the things which we discussed during the day would often resurface in my mind in the middle of the night—thoughts which continued to develop and evolve. There were times when I doubted my journey, questioned my purpose, my art, my environment and wondered about my role as an artist and how I managed to become part of the surplus labor force of this era. I wanted to get to the root of these issues, so I riffled through the past, seeking all that was hidden, searching bit by bit, and through this process, I realized “I am the People.”

This group of people, this collective, has always existed, coming and going, waxing and waning, sometimes vague and indistinct, sometimes lucidly-defined. Sometimes I found that “I” became “you” and “you” became “I.” Sometimes I found that I was not myself and neither were you. Sometimes I was “us,” and at the same time the plural “you” or maybe even “them.” An expression, a gesture, a glance, a smile, a question, an answer, a look, a doubtful glance, a clarification of an idea, a yawn, a spell of silence—all these fragments of reality and the socio-political and economic forces of production have at the same time shaped this “collective,” acting like a container which determined the contours of its form, the contours of its face.

Within this community, where life goes on as usual, through these ordinary, pedestrian, common, plain and sincere individual experiences, and phases of life, how can we build a society of the self, to examine the current singular and enduring modes of thinking, and how to influence the space of people’s existence and communication in a long-term way within the socio-political and economic structures; this has become the focus of this project.

Note: The title of this project “I am the People” was inspired by the first line of Mr. Xiao Kaiyu’s “North Station”: which reads “I felt I was a multitude.”

https://lixiaofeiart.com/artworks_video_people_1/