Passion

Jun-Jieh WANG

Passion, depicts the passionate fall of a larger-than-life character in daily life. The story is set at an abandoned dock at sunset. Hal, an astronaut, appears abruptly at the dock where he encounters three lingering, idle sailors. From that moment on, their lives become intertwined as the lonely dock becomes permeated with a sense of desire. After an intense fight and struggle, Sailors die in a pool of blood as the passion disappears into thin air. The setting of Passion is inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last movie in 1982, Querelle. As a representative figure of the New German Cinema that started in the late sixties, Fassbinder’s prolific career and anti-aestheticism attitude reflected the rebellion against his time and its politics and artistic trends. In Passion, The artist not only employs and appropriates imageries from Fassbinder’s movies but also those from the movies of the representative French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, along with visual elements from the legendary yet untimely deceased fashion designer, Alexander McQueen. The video simultaneously refers to sensual, physical passion as well as an artist’s passion for art-making. When the passion dissipates, the force that drives it also disappears; what can stop the passion, then? It is something like death, in which the physical body and the momentum of desire succumb to the external world, leaving nothing but emptiness and parti-colored imagination.