Conviction
Two Channel Video Installation// 16mm, HD & AE Animation // Sound // Color // 18 Minutes // 2021
Co-Directed with Simon Liu
Sound by Andrew Gilbert
World Premiere of force and Sistern (16mm, HD & AE Animation) (expanded versions):
Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Time Based Arts Festival 2021
force (16mm & AE Animation, 9 minutes) premiere: New York Film Festival: Currents, 2020
International Kurtzfilmtage Winterthur 2021
CROSSROADS w/ SF Cinematheque 2021
San Diego Asian Film Festival 2021
Onion City Film Festival 2021
ICDOCS - Iowa City Documentary Festival 2021
Ann Arbor Film Festival 2021
* Ann Arbor Film Festival: Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award 2021 *
Conviction is the manic intricate dance of two films by sister/brother artists, shot in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2021.
in force, placid views merge with dizzying, semi-abstract digital animations—avatars in a parable about control. A mesmerizing, menacing voiceover—part body politic regulator, part cyberpunk travel guide—both promises order, accountability, and satisfaction, and threatens trouble, polarization, and tears.
Sistern is a wild abstraction of Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider - a 1939 short story set in 1918 in the final months of WWI and the last pandemic, tracing the fever dreams of one young woman as she touches near-death, loses a beloved, and negotiates her identity with the brutality of a world at war. Between layers of oppressive weather, fantasy - dark and transcendent- is a portal for transforming fear into new futures - resilient, big hearted, sisterly.
A tightly choreographed machine regulates the terrain of how breath and movement may flow, promising order, accountability, and green space. Words fall over a city, making control concrete. An adolescent shield absorbs, distorts, purges in the night, becomes a reservoir for a death dance. Between layers of oppressive weather, fantasy screens fears and futures, suffocating/sad, noncompliant, wielding/wearing symbols/cymbals, washed in rain.
Camera Assistance by Jenny Wan
Performed by valc, Meagan Chau, Clarissa Choi, Ahlia Koram, Reina Lim, Jacqueline Lo, Shania Lui Montevalde, Tianna Tsang, To Wing, Zoé Wong
Vocals by Tam Lai Kwan Julius
Gratitude to PICA, Lindsey McAllister, and the Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation
it’s the summer of 2021, and america is happy again, screening/screaming embracing/creating.
on another side, the sun blasts through masks, just another territory moving from one nation’s grasp to another’s.
in the visionary space of illness, breakdown, crackdown, lays the final frontier of freedom: fantasy.
through the night we dream about jail.
in the daytime, my sublimated terror looks askance at your sublimated terror.
your perception of truth is my perception of ideology.
a new friend tells me to watch out for a certain professor of media studies. she controls people. she messes with their minds.
in the everyday apocalypse, the intermingling of the family state and the body, the weight of daily events lays heavy. the law lays on the breath. invisible forces compel, condition our shape. runs through our blood, boils it. thins it.
then there are everyday weaknesses, felt fluctuations of security and insecurity - mundane and secret/bodily, a somatic state produced by the ruptures and cracks of what is bloodless, but violent.
on the other side of this restraint there is release into oblivion.
on the other side of this unity there is nightmare.
on the other side of adolescence there is power.
august on the train. two women, late teens, jean shorts, tank tops, sneakers, fasten necklaces from paper boxes around each other’s necks. a conviction ritual, harnessed in gold plate.
we will build a shared community.
we will be strong and beautiful.