The wish

In my creation of the work "Wishes," which combines real-life video recording with AI-generated art, I showcase the questioning and contemplation of the past, present, and future three-dimensional space by the current generation of Gen Z youth. I strive to break the boundaries of time and space, allowing for a more liberated use of various visual languages and techniques to create a narrative style and visual effects with a personal touch. The work lacks a coherent storyline; everything unfolds from a single question, "What is your birthday wish?", leading to a fragmented sequence of images. The text within the work also lacks strong logical and causal relationships, directly questioning the viewer outside the screen as if by instinct.

The word "wish," filled with hope, not only exists in childhood but also runs through one's life and becomes a common prayer of the times. The work connects and contrasts "personal wishes" with "social expectations" as key themes, stringing together two narrative spaces: one is the live-action scenes in the style of 1990s lead-yellow films, where I, the author, either hold a toy candle while stooping under a chimney or sit cross-legged in an abandoned factory, holding a toy cake and looking straight ahead; the other is the imagined scenes of apocalyptic disasters and cosmic technology generated by artificial intelligence algorithms, filled with a retro-futuristic style.

Using childhood birthday wishes as a starting point, I montage real scenes, personal experiences, and AI motion effects, intending to awaken a retrospective and emulation of past collective memories in a dreamlike, indistinguishable nonlinear narrative. It also displays the conceptual conflicts of being young in the present and the identity dilemmas when looking towards the future. The work ends in a suspenseful open loop that echoes the beginning, meaning that the timeline of the work can be opened from either end, and the viewer has already crossed the boundary between reality and fiction—perhaps the end is also another beginning.