Jinming Zhong

Jinming Zhong’s 13-hour film investigates and demystifies the ‘cinematic form’. Shot using the smartphone and natural light, it presents real-time events from May 12th 7:30 pm to May 13th 8:30 am, 2017 in New York City, focuses on two characters, Chinese art student Steven and Chinese American Poppy who’s a performer based in LA, as they meet at JFK by chance and spend 13 hours together exploring the city of New York. Taking place over the course of one night, the limited time leads them revealing more about themselves, talking about their experience and perspective of love and life.

Using smartphone as a diaristic and ephemeral media, she constructs a spontaneous live-action film, filled with improvisations. It’s broadcasted as a nonstop live streaming video through digital platforms. ‘Nomadic Butterflies’ proposes a much more open cinema where the server is the biggest projector, and each image, inhabited by the characters, comes across as the fixed representation of a potential story, or a story in the making. Without clearly purposeful meanings in scenes, ‘Time’ is not a requirement but a potential landscape. This movie comes to be the groups of suspended images but intrinsically is the flow of online information. So it’s meant to be picked up by anyone at anytime. Which I think it is the final scenario for all kinds of images in digital times. It’s a real-time narrative placed in a real-time media, audiences have the total autonomy to perambulate, combine or construct their own sequences of images. It’s a new form of Montage in the post cinematic era which is picked up in each audience’s mind.