Doll+: Body Transmigration in its Ideal Fantasy looks at stereotypes surrounding body aesthetics from a posthuman point of view. We centre our focus on a non-sexual, virtual character - a plastic toy manufactured in a Chinese factory at the assembly line. By placing the reborn doll's body into a virtual world of absurdity, this work stimulates the perspective of the doll's self-identification and transmigration of their body's development. Blurring the boundaries between man and object, this project presents the 'body' as a product of consciousness, while consciousness is sculptured and confined by both capitalist society and collectivism.




Director Statement


Our body is a troublesome thing.

It never changes in conjunction with our own will. On the contrary, it is awkward and resistant to change. My long history of grappling with the imperfect body was the catalyst for me to start work on this project. Quoting Nietzsche's "The farthest thing from us is our own self"; our subtle relationship with the body and the subconscious starts with the fact that we cannot fully see our own body. Our struggle between the 'ideal' and the 'real' body is also a process of self-recognition and identification – it reflects a desperate obsession with 'beauty' and a deeper aesthetic standardisation defined and solidified by society.

The doll is considered a cyborg, which Donna Haraway defined as "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." The doll is us; we are cyborgs – the condensed image of both the subconscious and material reality. In the video, the virtual world is chaos located between the two and three-dimensional worlds, which contains many trans-cultural elements and references: video games, films, fashion culture, western art theory and eastern ideology (Taoism, Buddism), etc. Its storyline is a process of transmigration, which begins with a 'preface' followed by three chapters.