A Love Relationship with "Virtual" / 一段与武秋儿的虚拟恋情
 

Thanks to the help of Liqian Yang, Taowen Pan and her friends, Xun Ding, Shihong Cheng, Di Wu, Tianyu Zhou, Qiyang Zhang and every audiences of the project.

 

My initial purposes were to explore the relationship between people, friends in particular, in modern society, as well as the credibility of public information among people. I started the project and my recording of the process by professing my love for my conceived girlfriend on WeChat, the most widely used social media in China, receiving hundreds of likes and some comments from people who, in some degree, constituted the earliest audience of my work.

Thanks to the virtual nature of internet and special photographing skills, I was able to flesh out this virtual relationship and push forward the project. For instance, I named my conceived girlfriend as “武秋儿”, a Chinese homonym of the English word ”virtual”, and posted on line our daily activities that I made up.

随着网络和社交媒介的普及，真假变的愈发难辨。在“我与我的虚拟女友”项目中，我利用中国普及程度最广的微信作为媒介，从诱导观众鼓励我表白开始，进行一次虚构情侣关系的“行为表演”，并用截图、摄影和视频进行记录。

我不断地通过对这段关系的各种侧面描写，结合互联网的传播、互动和摄影难辨真假的独特魅力，让这个项目不断深入下去。比如，我将这位虚拟女友命名为“武秋儿”，是英文virtual的谐音。另外还包括我和“她”的一系列虚构的日常活动。而在互动过程中，观者一直希望看到她的真实面目。因此，我虚构了“她”的一次生日聚会，并将自己“变”成我的“女朋友”，以行为艺术的方式真实体会虚构的过程，用摄影进行记录，并对结果加以伪造，从而一次又一次冲击现实与虚拟之间的边界。

During this process, the audience repeatedly expressed their wishes to have a look at the real “her”. My realisation is that, all the comments and choices we make are reflections of ourselves, and sometimes it’s hard to decide whether we are the choice-makers, or we are made by our choices. With this in mind, I chose to turn myself into my “girlfriend” so as to better explore the answer to this question.