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Faint With Oxygen is the piece with the most anthropologic significance of all my works. The piece was shot in the plateaus of western China, where Tibetan people live in compact, autonomous communities.
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Gao Shi-Qiang
Faint With Oxygen is the piece with the most anthropologic significance of all my works. The piece was shot in the plateaus of western China, where Tibetan people live in compact, autonomous communities.
After arriving in what is known as the “roof of the world,” I was determined to observe local people through my camera, to explore the nuances of their everyday lives, rather than to seek out what seemed to me exotic in this mysterious world. It would have been too easy to focus on the beautiful scenery and typical cultural subjects, which could be found everywhere. So before shooting, I decided that the close-up would be the main technique in this video, as I wanted to record faces and explore the hearts beneath and thoughts behind those faces.
In this snow-covered highland 5,000 meters above the sea level, I found what I was looking for in the story of a young man named Gairi Luosong Gelai, the cousin of our local guide. Luosong had never left the area, and had never seen the world outside of it. Like most young people there, he didn’t receive any education. Day after day, all he saw was the wide grassland (he sometimes went days at a time without seeing another person), blue sky, white clouds, cows, sheep, and the changes of the four seasons.
Luosong was only one among thousands of young uneducated people there. Even if a Tibetan youth studies hard and goes to college, it is difficult for him to find a job upon graduation. And even if he does find a job, the income is still less than what he can earn herding cows and sheep. So most people in the grassland don’t want to go to school and don’t bother learning Chinese—for them, Chinese is useless. But Gairi Luosong Gelai was different. Though Chinese was of no practical use to him, he taught himself the language by listening to the radio since he was a boy and turning to friends and relatives for help when they occasionally visited his home from the city.
As his cousin says in the video, there is no chance for Luosong to walk out of the grassland and get in touch with another world (the world of the Han people? the world of modern civilization?) because he got married and had a child: the Tibetans, who are faithful to their traditions, stay with their families for life. Luosong, however, was still crazy about Chinese. When we were shooting, he always kept close to us, taking all chances to speak with us in Chinese. Why did he try so hard to do something useless?
Just as Chinese people in cities of the east have fantasized about Tibet and its “Shangri-La,” treating it as an exotic world that remains in an “original” or “pure” state, Luosong was full of curiosity and fantasies about the world outside of the grassland, the world below the highland.
