Zheng Yuan
I Thought I Saw the Murderer
Duration : 15 min. 51 sec.
Materials : Two-Channel HD Video, HD, color, sound
Year : 2015

I witnessed and filmed two deer who had wandered into the neighborhood of the Gold Coast of Chicago on the last day of the October 2013. The nature of the event was innocuous but the impression at the scene appeared to be a very opposite scenario: the presence of news reporters, policeman, onlookers, searchlights, all gave a strong sense that a murder happening there.

The other story covers a real murder of one teenager who was killed outside of a McDonald’s in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. The news is reported by the same television station (CBS Chicago), it shows the same journalist who reported on the deer story.
Later I visited the crime scene to film. The images I filmed ironically show two scene in opposite ways: one seems to be serious but indeed nothing happened, the other as if nothing happened but was a real tragedy. Here two different stories have been edited in the exactly the same format: one image imitating another image. This “diction of the image” finally presents itself by playing the two different news report side by side.

I Thought I Saw Murderer showing two different incidents that both were filmed by the artist and a local news reporter in Chicago, explores both contrast and similarity of different narratives of events, analyzing how the information gets visualized and mediated by the mechanism of media.