Secrets of a watermelon © Beat Kuert (with Barbara Lehnhoff)

Secrets of a watermelon

SECRETS OF A WATERMELON:

In the video work Secrets of a Watermelon (9’47” Video 2007), he creates a multiple narrative structure around a girl and a watermelon and the elusively complex implications between man and object, between people, between man and incidence; he uses these symbols to create a labyrinth of language. Does the artist see the watermelon as a lover? Or as a baby? As a sex toy? It seems that love is also an injury that accompanies you and dialogues with you day and night, meets you in your dreams and fights with you in reality. The destroyed watermelon can be food as well as blood flowing from a wound... these images make up the dual contradictory relationship between the body and matter. (And one day I had my days and I was thirsty for blood, for blood - blood-red flesh the flesh of a watermelon) These lyrics cause a displacement in our interpretation of the video work; here, if the watermelon is not an object or a person, then what is it?   (Zhang Xiaotao)