With his video and photography work, Chen Xiaoyun examines the relationship between the individual and society in China’s rapidly changing cultural climate. In his video films he emphasizes the importance of the role of the artist in the search for possible ways in which the individual can escape. Using strong, apparently meaningless and anarchic gestures, in the two videos DRAG (2006) and LASH (2005) Chen Xiaoyun examines the preoccupation of the human individual with its environment, which as merely a cog in the machinery of increasing industrialization, is dominated by physical exertion. As an expression of the pointlessness of redundant work, DRAG shows a man, who pulls with all his might a rope whose end is fixed to a wall. As Chen Xiaoyun comments: ‘You have no reason to know nothing, about all is darkness.’ In his work this darkness appears in the shadow world behind the wall.