Beijing Changping Qiliqu Temporary Shelter
Xu Ruotao
Release year: 2008
Run time: 10 mins
Film type: Animation
Synopsis
Beijing Changping Qiliqu Temporary Shelter is a shelter that was part of the network of temporary shelters used in China from the early 1950s to accommodate homeless people (the liumang 流氓). Changping Qiliqu shelter was used as a detention center in the 1990s, in particular, to incarcerate recalcitrant Yuanmingyuan artists, including Xu Ruotao. With its cold and soulless images, this video has a latent subversive tone, and a consistent vision of a hostile world.
Director biography
XU Ruotao, a visual artist and a filmmaker, born in Shenyang in 1968, lives and works in Beijing. He began his career in the early 1990s by joining the then renowned avant-garde Yuanmingyuan Painter's Village. He has worked in a variety of media, including painting, video installations and graffiti films, as well as the 3D animated short film Beijing Changping Qiliqu Temporary Shelter (2008). His first experimental film, Rumination (2009), was nominated for the Dragon Tiger Awards at the 29th Vancouver Film Festival. In 2012, he collaborated with JP Sniadecki and Huang Xiang on the film Yumen, which was selected for the Berlinale and the Mexican Film Festival. In 2012 he also collaborated with Xue Li on the short film Broken Lines, which was selected for the 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival and the Asian Experimental Film and Video Art Forum. His other films include Expressionism (2013-2017), Ants Dynamics (2019), and Ink Cowboy (2022).