"Bei-Jiang-Qi" is short for the three townships of Beimen, Jiangjun, and Qigu off the coast of Tainan County. Director HUANG has stayed here since 2005 after having moved more than 20 times. In 2009, he began to document the area. It took him 12 years to accumulate footage of the ever-changing times, yet it seems nothing has changed. The film presents an immense record of open landscapes and the footprints of human activities. The two are independent yet codependent of each other. In the film, HUANG tries to portray a way of life. When the camera is still, every movement condenses into one. In between different takes, moments sometimes suspend as if captured by a still photo. Although it took 12 years to film A Silent Gaze, this is not a work about time. Instead, it is about timelessness. The moment presented on the screen may be a present moment, may be a moment of the past, or perhaps a moment in the future. And at every moment, one wonders whose moment it is. As a part of a discussion on memory and detemporality, this work comes in another 3-channel video installation as further dialogue with this single-channel video.
