Rituals of leisure on the grass one sunny day in Central Park

Combining vertical strips of video of Central Park on a single sunny Sunday, Green Play is ‘a joyful orchestration of one of the great meeting places in New York City’, in the words of film’s director Yuge Zhou, who was born in China but is now based in Chicago. Small human figures recline and move across the green grass that fills most of the screen – an artificial and carefully manicured space in the middle of one of the world’s most massive population centres. Recorded from a distance, the people moving in and out of view all seem to be participating in a shared ritual as they toss frisbees and kick balls, chat with friends, family and significant others, or simply lie out in the sun. Green Play is part of Zhou’s video collage series The Humors, which sets out to explore ‘urban behaviours and relationships, those of people and of the built environment itself’.