From issue: #25 Multiplication
Rui Lan in Conversation with Diane Smyth, 06 December 2024
DS: How did you get into photography and film?
RL: For my BA I moved to Beijing and studied finance, but after I graduated I went to an exhibition by Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe and found myself caught by his work. Previously, I didn’t know that photography could be a language, I just saw it on a technical level and especially about how to make someone pretty. But when I saw his show, I realised we can use photography to express something deep, like writing but about visual things. After that I started to read a lot of theory, then I quit my job to become a freelance photographer, then applied to the RCA. In London I have seen many inspiring exhibitions, but I particularly enjoyed Jake Elwes at the Victoria & Albert Museum, because he uses the language of tech, and technology itself, to criticise technology.
DS: Why did you start to use repetition in your work?
RL: At first it was intuition. I made a project about my grandfather, for example [84/Eighty Four, 2023], and I was thinking about the fact that, in his generation, everyone had a portrait of the President and his wife in their living room. I used repeated elements, and I realised that the whole work became more intense, so then I used it again, more intentionally. In Kill Heroes the first part uses repetition, and it seems like a good metaphor of something. In the second half there is a single figure in blue, and it represents individuality.
DS: In the Kill Heroes project description, you reference Jung’s theory of individuation. What is that?
RL: He has this publication called the Red Book, which is like his personal diary, his own individuation journey. It’s the process of separating from the system or culture you were born into, and becoming more conscious about your own position and desires. If every single person went through this process, and really knew what they wanted, we would not be so easily manipulated by what is happening around us. But the system is like a gigantic repression.
DS: How does Kill Heroes explore this idea?
RL: In the moving images, there are four stages. The first stage is surveillance, in which the power is always keeping an eye on us. The second is spinning, in which we stay in the same place, we become a fixed component of a whole mechanism or machine. The third part is about being positive, ‘up is good’, because in China people were always telling me to be positive. It’s like a phenomenon where people are always trying to convince themselves that everything is fine! Then in the last stage it’s about lying down and receiving. You’re just lying down with your mouth open, waiting to be fed.
DS: What kind of surveillance are you referencing in this work?
RL: It’s the behaviour of supervising, and that can be through CCTV but also the internet or just our behaviour. It doesn’t even need to be someone else watching us, if we feel like someone is watching us, we will modify our behaviour. I think this is universal throughout history, but with photography and cameras, we have raised surveillance to another level. The surveillance is there all the time now, it’s completely externalised.
DS: How do you use technology to involve your audience?
RL: At the RCA we talked about open systems, in which the participation of the audience is required to complete the work. So for my final presentation I used Python coding, so that when people entered the installation, a camera and sensors detected their face and motion. I asked them to do something very silly, like put their hands up and down several times. After that, I questioned them about what they had experienced, then modified the work to maximise audience participation. I reduced the number of times they had to raise their hands, for example, and cancelled some sensors, so that it was easier for the audience to pass the game and stay for the second part. My intention was to guide the visitors to be aware of their roles within the system, to reflect on the motives behind different behaviours in day to day life.
DS: Do you still feel the same about systems and individuation now?
RL: When I started working on Jung’s individuation idea, I was working on the idea of an isolated self, isolated from surroundings and from others. But the more I did with this project, the more I realised it’s not possible just to chase for an isolated self. We have to interact with the system, the surroundings, the people around us, and all of them have helped shape us. This was an important motive for me to make my work interactive. We are social beings, we change by doing the tango with different circumstances. That was an important shift for me, to move from the idea of an isolated island to an interactive being.
Rui Lan Born in 1996 in Guangxi, China, Rui Lan now lives and works in London. She graduated from the Photography MA at Royal College of Art in 2024 with a final project titled Kill Heroes which uses photography, film, technology, and games to encourage audiences to recognise social systems and search for their own perspectives
Diane Smyth is Editor of the Photoworks Annual and of the British Journal of Photography, and also teaches photography Theory and History at the London College of Communications. She has written for numerous publications, including The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Aperture, Apollo, The Art Newspaper and Trigger, as well as for monographs and exhibition catalogues.
