After the Body

After the Body is a moving image work centred on Cotard syndrome. It places the body’s continued activity alongside the conviction that one has already died, giving visual form to a conflict between physical presence and the sense of being alive. Movement and everyday contact persist, while the body’s signs of life fail to resolve the conviction of death. The work approaches this conflict through relationships between images, their independent rhythms and repeated return.

A bed, a mirror, family photographs, drawings, text and a coffin recur as visual elements. Each offers a different way of locating the body: as something that wakes and moves, an image that can be recognised, a place within a family, a form that can be described, or something held within a bounded space. Their changing combinations allow these forms of presence to coexist without settling into a single account. The conviction of death remains in contact with visible signs of life throughout the work.

Two-part compositions establish a temporal distance between the moving body and its reflection. A gesture continues on one side while a face remains suspended on the other. The body enters a new state, yet the image retains an earlier smile. The familiar face gradually becomes estranged from the activity beside it. This loss of synchrony gives the work a visual language for the distance between bodily presence and the perception of one’s own death.

In the four-part compositions, bodily movement, domestic scenes, photographs, drawings and text occupy the same field of vision. Each part retains its own rhythm. One image changes while another persists; one falls dark while the others continue. Attention moves between them, carrying traces of what has already been seen. Meaning develops through comparison, missed detail and memory. The instability extends into the act of looking: visible information accumulates, but a coherent sense of presence remains difficult to assemble.

Family photographs and drawings introduce a relational dimension. They give the body a recognisable place among others, while ordinary domestic gestures suggest a life continuing around it. Within the work, this social recognition cannot resolve the conviction of death. Familiarity and belonging remain visible, yet they do not restore the internal certainty of being alive. The images hold these experiences together and allow the distance between them to persist.

Repetition changes the weight of familiar images. A smiling face, a photograph or a drawing returns beside a body whose condition has shifted. The same expression may accompany waking, distress or an empty area of the composition. On its return, the image encounters the viewer’s memory of its earlier relationships. Recognition becomes less reassuring as those relationships change. The repeated image also keeps the conviction of death present, bringing it into renewed contact with the body’s continued activity.

Held frames, stuttering motion, reversal and brief black interruptions alter the continuity of the reflection. These interventions allow movement in an adjacent image to continue while the face pauses or disappears. An empty area retains the place where an image was seen, leaving its absence active within the composition. The viewer remembers the face and may continue to wait for its return. Visibility becomes intermittent, giving a spatial and temporal form to the negation of presence.

Sound adds another layer of time. The phrase “I think I might be dead” acts as a point of tension within sustained and fading background sound. Ordinary replies arrive later. A voice may remain after its image has disappeared, or enter another arrangement of images. These delays allow language to persist as a fragment of memory. Being heard and being understood occupy different moments, extending the distance between an internal experience and the life continuing around it.

Towards each return, images withdraw and the coffin remains, before fading into waking and bodily movement. Sound carries across the join. Familiar images return into contact with the viewer’s accumulated memory, allowing their relationships to be reconsidered. Bodily activity and the conviction of death remain together, while attention and interpretation continue to shift.

The Chinese title, 余身, evokes a body that remains: still moving, still visible, yet experienced as already dead. Its presence continues through gestures, images, relationships and sound. After the Body holds this contradiction open through the rhythms of looking and listening, bringing the conviction of death into sustained contact with the traces of a life that continues.