This meticulously animated short by the Chinese new-media artist and educator Cao Shu traverses some five millennia of art in a single minute. As flickering images move chronologically, in flipbook fashion, through a parade of styles and artistic movements – from Ancient Egypt, to the Impressionist era, to the 20th century avant-garde – a gender-shifting character makes a series of simple movements, seemingly ambling through the history of art.
A jaunt through five millennia of art history in just one minute
Director: Cao Shu

videoTravel
Beijing via salvaged family photos – ‘an epic portrait of anonymous humanity’
6 minutes

videoFilm and visual culture
Japanese news clippings from 1991 blur into a hypnotic collage
3 minutes

videoCities
Time dilates and people flow in and out of each other in a hallucinatory urban commute
3 minutes

videoComputing and artificial intelligence
What do the terms ‘life’, ‘love’, ‘art’ and ‘god’ look like to an algorithm?
5 minutes

videoArt
The Renaissance art illusion that proved everything is a matter of perspective
14 minutes

videoFilm and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes

videoGender and identity
Mind racing, body still – for Ming, being a nude figure model is emotionally fraught work
3 minutes

videoDance and theatre
A ballerina dances with the geometry of her own movements
3 minutes

videoFamily life
A son of China’s former one-child policy remembers the sibling he never had
8 minutes