When Chinese mixed media artist Zhou Tao had his critical breakout with The Periphery of the Base in 2024, it seemed like he had conjured up an entirely new form of surveillance-as-art. His observations of a massive (and undefined) infrastructure project’s construction in the Gobi Desert only remained briefly grounded in the more anecdotal and observational side of what could have been a conventional documentary. The film’s editing then transfigured the resulting material into a series of free-floating transitions and dissolves via telephoto zoom lens manipulations. The resulting creation resembled the subconscious projections of a heatstroke-addled mind taking flight. His new project, The Rib of the Greater Bay Area, is more muted and less about the extremities of sky and sand, but his transitions remain just as borderline indescribable — this time, they encourage the description “as free-flowing as water” for their focus on the bodies of water in the titular Greater Bay Area of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao.
Humans are seen enjoying themselves in The Rib of the Greater Bay Area, but they never quite stick around: Zhou frequently uses the blurry greens of plants by the waterside, or the blue tones of water and sky, to switch to an entirely different body of water with different people utilizing it. The sound mix seamlessly fades in and out, but it never quite sounds entirely like water due to the incorporation of noises from surrounding bridges and signals from buoys and communication towers. Most of the locations were reportedly chosen for being sensations on Chinese social media website RedNotes, a source of recommendations for both the average photographer-tourist, and for Zhou’s own experiments in displacement. There’s an increase in the focus on humanity when compared to the preceding Zhou films in The Periphery of the Base and Zhou’s data center exploration The Axis of Big Data (2023). (Water, or lack thereof, is the main common factor uniting these three locations.) Extreme close-ups of both actual bystanders and the metallic contours of human figure statues are recurring images. It’s likely that the tourist-centric nature of these sites demonstrates the fact that they are aimed toward the needs and enjoyment of the people, rather than the more inhospitable locations Zhou has previously explored and deconstructed. We even get the dry joke of seeing people use their smartphones to capture similar images in a more banal fashion (anyone can be Zhou Tao!), and a bride in a wedding dress appears to be submerging herself in the water for a photoshoot in her own right — a marriage out of mythology to the sea itself. Still, one can always count on birds flying through the sky as a guide from one location to another in his most recent triptych of works.
Any further descriptions of The Rib of the Greater Bay Area’s merits would have to tend toward attempting to approximate the audiovisual, and the film’s downstream drift is best experienced for oneself rather than read about — it’s a time-based pictorial scroll where the unwinding is the key action. Nothing is ever seen in its totality, and understanding the complete picture requires seeing it in action. It seems perhaps unlikely that Zhou Tao saw the obscure-but-great Stan Brakhage film Made Manifest (1981), but the final shift from the impermanent forms of bodies of water to the wavelike forms of mountains has a certain kinship with the experimental master’s awe at the wild world. Still, for an attempt at a few more reductions of cinema to mere words: one sequence, set to the eerie echoes of a melancholy song on some faraway coast, bisects the frame into a pure black triangle and a slowly rippling body of water that glows like the sunset it seems to be reflecting. It only lasts for a few precious moments before the water returns to a more conventional color and we shift the focus to a lonely swimmer’s paddling through a more conventional shade of blue. Another sequence goes from the unreal prismatic hues that we associate more with lens flares and digital screens than with nature, before transitioning to the earthy sight of filthy-looking water buffaloes being bathed by a handler. Whether Zhou decides to keep maintaining this stylistic approach or plans to deviate remains to be seen, but for pure technique, few filmmakers can match his filmmaking cartography at the moment, precisely because his maps are so untraceable.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2026.
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