With Every Step, the Boots Risk Being Thrown Off, 2025
Single-channel video, 24 min
The video was filmed on a shared massage chair in a shopping mall in China.
Slient

Shared massage chairs have spread across Chinese public space — malls, stations, airports, cinemas. They are not incidental. They form an infrastructure: one designed to manage exhaustion, to make it sustainable, to return the body to circulation without asking what exhausted it in the first place.

This video turns the camera not on the chair's function, but on its surface. Close to the leather, light and shadow move across folds and creases in ways that suggest muscle, breath, an interior rhythm. What remains is something that looks organic — a system operating on its own terms, quietly, continuously.

This is what ideology looks like when it is working well. It does not announce itself. It knows you are tired. It offers relief. It asks nothing in return except that you continue. The massage chair is one site where this logic becomes visible — a stability-maintenance device disguised as a service, a political apparatus with the texture of care.

The work is an attempt to film ideology as if it were a living thing: to find, in the movement of leather under light, the rhythm of a system that sustains itself by absorbing what threatens it.