Different Routes, Same Target

Three-Channel Video Stereo Sound, Chinese and English Subtitle

2022

The aviation industry has been devastated during the pandemic of the past few years. Travel restrictions introduced by various countries and exorbitant airfares have made travel unaffordable and complicated for many people. This change in policy has also altered human migration habits and connections to different geographic areas. In my personal experience, in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, my path back to my hometown in China changed from two flights to four, with the potential for error at every step, leaving me stranded in a completely foreign country.

My experience is not an isolated one; countless wanderers are like migrating birds lost in a rainstorm, trying to return to their harbor with different and even outrageous schemes. In India, thousands of people trek back to the countryside for tens of days. In China, overseas students study no less than dozens of transit routes back to their home countries. This includes, but is not limited to, entering by bus from the border of Vietnam, getting a temporary student visa from Korea, or obtaining a nanny work visa from Hong Kong.

Inspired by these experiences in the post-epidemic era, I wanted to use this creation to illustrate how these fragmented journeys reshape the way we view travel, other places, and homeland. As the old Chinese saying goes, different paths lead to the same place. How should we view the places we have stopped briefly on our way home? And how do they form part of the human migration?