- CollegeCentral Saint Martins
- CourseBA (Hons) Fine Art
- Graduation year2025
Inspired by Dean MacCannell’s theory of choreographed performance, my ongoing project, Migrating Attractions, examines how cultural authenticity is staged, mediated, and sold. Morocco and China, shaped by colonial histories and caravan routes, serve as case studies. The first film of this project reveals how landscapes and traditions are repackaged to meet external expectations, hiding deeper histories of colonization, displacement, and environmental change. While the indigenous cultures are reduced to ornamental backgrounds, I sought to invite the audience to rethink the purpose of travelling. And the second film, New Travelogue: Mayfly, reveals a fragmented and collage journey to Madagascar, derived from the travelogues by different people on social media. The project investigates how the spectacle of heritage, development, and cultural display is increasingly mediated by digital systems and algorithmic infrastructures.
Final work
Migrating Attractions
The film, Migrating Attractions, blends travel footage from Morocco and China, AI-generated animation, and Blender-based simulations.Drawing from Dean MacCannell’s theory of choreographed performance in tourism, I explore how front-stage and back-stage realities construct cultural authenticity.Through immersive digital environments, the work critiques the tensions between heritage, economic pressures, and the monopolisation of landscapes in contemporary tourism.
My experiences in China and Morocco evoke my explorations of how colonization lingers in land and culture. In China, urbanization around Sayram Lake is set to replace the natural landscape with luxury resorts. In Morocco, Aït Benhaddou, a historic fortified village used in Hollywood films, still lacks electricity. At its base, a temporary replica is built for movie shoots, only to be dismantled afterwards.
The fragmentations of indigenous cultures are being reduced to the backdrop in the growing inquiry of “signature routes” in tourism. And these travel plans reinforce the commodification rather than the preservation of local culture and lands.
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