The world is his oyster

Gabriel White shows the video diary of his walk along the Great Wall of China. Photo / Dean Purcell

You'd think that if you were going to get harassed for using a video camera in a public place, it would be in a country as tightly controlled as China. Yet Auckland filmmaker Gabriel White had no such problems when he travelled through China in 2003.

"I have no illusions about China, " he says, "but in my case, it was surprisingly easy to film. At one point there was a statue of Chairman Mao in Kashgar, an Uyghur city in the extreme west of China with soldiers marching around and I say on the camera I found it amazing I could actually be there with a video camera blatantly filming and commenting."

On the other hand, when he tried to film in a supermarket in Auckland, he was stopped. "I am always aware I am being cheeky but at the same time I am asserting a human right," he says. "If I am in a supermarket, I am being filmed and there's a kind of irony in that. They don't let me film myself."

The footage from White's Chinese sojourn, edited into a film called A Journey to the West, forms part of a survey of his work at the Film Archive called The World Blank, along with four other projects set in Melbourne, South Korea, Mexico and Auckland. White, 37, who received a Masters in Art and Design at Auckland University of Technology last year, says he uses his camera as a "word processor" to explore a place, musing on his surroundings - and anything else that comes to mind. He edits down the hours of footage into "chapters" and looks for a "flavour" or theme. His monologues are always off-the-cuff, and never dubbed over, which adds immediacy.

The Auckland film, titled Aucklantis in reference to Plato's story about the mythical sunken island, is not a pretty travelogue. White cleans his teeth, does the washing-up, drifts along a street above a motorway, then ponders the vagaries of recycling, what it must be like to work in a bank...

"That's why it's called The World Blank - it came up in one of the clips from Aucklantis, I was making fun of banks, standing outside a a bank and thought I'd call it a blank - blank tellers, blank manager, playing around with words. Then I thought it would be good for this show, a retrospective. That has been the idea all the way along, treat the camera as a blank slate."

White has been around the Auckland art scene for some time, starting out making long poster friezes, playing in improvisational groups like Spacesuit and James McCarthy's Rotaction, and collaborating with musician Steve Abel, writer Jack Ross and performance artist Mark Harvey.

Ross, who he describes as a mentor, has encouraged him to broaden his knowledge by reading. "I didn't start reading seriously until I started travelling. Mostly I've read books about the history of the countries I was going to visit, books with a wider scope of history like Frances Yates' The Art of Memory. I am not quite up to using that material directly but it is giving a depth of context."

White's films in the show have a rough, grungy quality, shot with a series of cameras from a VHSC to a Sony Hi-8. He shoots hours of film, then spends "years and years" honing it down. "The idea is to produce this abundance of material then select from it really particular things and put it together in a particular order. The first work I made, the Melbourne one, I wanted to make a work that lasted a whole day," he laughs. "I managed to get it to last about

four hours, this ping-pong conversation between two monitors and it was ridiculously indulgent.

"But I was interested in the idea that when you read a book, you get immersed for a long time, so what if I made a movie that took the same amount of time that it takes to read a book and experiment with that.

"I knew it was going to fail because it would have a lot of crap - and it did have a lot of stuff that didn't work - but there were nice little moments in it. So that's when I realised I had to distil those things."

White spent a year in South Korea teaching English, a profession he continues in his Auckland day job. The country proved rich pickings. "The Korean movie - Tongdo Fantasia - is more seductive because it is in Asia; China too, although China was pretty rough. Korea was quite intoxicating visually. Tongdosa is a Buddhist temple near Gyeong-ju right next to an amusement park called Tongdo Fantasia. My idea of Korea was exactly that - a totally vulgar amusement park next to the area with the greatest Buddhist art in Korean history. That is Korea - weird juxtapostions everywhere. It's still a pretty brutal video."

White says his next format will be "based around a kind of blogging language, a more interactive type of work you see on the internet, maybe an online cinema".

For now, watch A Journey to the West at the very least for the sequence showing White clambering along the Great Wall of China. The surrounding scenery is stunning. The image on the exhibition flyer, of the place where the Silk Road once started out from the West Gate of Xian is too - though for uglier reasons.

Exhibition

What: The World Blank, by Gabriel White
Where and when: Film Archive, 300 K Rd, to April 28