After 'A Kiss After Drink' is a work that discusses intimate relationships, consisting of two continuous love stories: A Kiss After Drink and Since Then.
A Kiss After Drink is an adaptation from a short story of the same name published by Ling Shuhua 凌叔華 in 1925, presented in the form of seventeen light-boxes. It tells a story of love vs. lust/freedom vs. loyalty and sets the example of the awakening and expression of women's consciousness during the May Fourth Movement. The artist made Leshan as the filming location of A Kiss After Drink where Ling Shuhua moved to, with National Wuhan University during the Second Sino-Japanese War. She corresponded with the British writer Virginia Woolf while she was in Leshan, and their friendship also implies Ling Shuhua's own love story.
Since Then is a continuation of A Kiss After Drink, set in Shanghai, and structured in three acts. It presents two narrative directions through multi-channel and split-screen videos. It also provides the contextual information of the husband's response to his wife's question in the play, "If I also want to kiss, would you allow it or not?"
In life, romantic relationships are either considered as a sort of privacy, avoided in conversations with others, or, when love affairs circulate as gossip, love inevitably becomes vulgarised. Especially in cyber world, just a few derogatory words with strong moral undertones can make people tremble with fear. The issue of love purposed by Ling Shuhua a hundred years ago still lack social consensus today, and a even greater division. In this sense, if love life is shrouded in the dust of shame, has our society progressed or regressed? Therefore, artists wish to discuss this issue seriously and openly, for the sake of love.
In terms of image and narrative, the artist explores the internal and external relationships among still image, motion picture, and text in mix-media works from the perspective of visual pragmatics. It specifically involves whether still image and motion picture modalities are interchangeable at narrative level; whether text can be viewed as a sign or symbol; and the various forms in which text can exist within a work, as well as the various ways it can be read/viewed.
Using the same materials from A Kiss After Drink, when presented in a still modality, it becomes a visual representation of Ling Shuhua's A Kiss After Drink. When these materials appear as meta-picture in Since Then, they become a hidden proposition in another narrative.
Additionally, the artist explicitly tells a phenomenon in cognitive linguistics: the meaning of words or sentences is almost always uncertain in the absence of context. For example, the interpretation of the husband's response in Since Then "No problem, just don't let me know," completely depends on which part of the context provided by the split-screen video the audience chooses to believe as a premise for reasoning. This choice directly determines the direction of the story's ending.
