Genres: experimental

  • Edgy Sexy Modern

    Edgy Sexy Modern is shopping as ritual — a twenty-first century, yet primeval dance. Edgy Sexy Modern was shot entirely inside mega-malls with a pocket camera that was dismissed or unnoticed by security guards and public alike. By using many creative editing techniques, this film unmasks mass behaviours and intimate, unguarded moments between individuals. The ritual is enacted in front of logo texts like Armani, Lacoste, Holt Renfrew, Banana Republic, Apple, and Tesla. No product is ever shown, but we know what these logos signify. Outside class, race and ethnicity may divide the cosmopolis, but inside the mega-mall the diversity…

  • Lily In The Grinder

    Kaleidoscopic, operatic, and layered, Lily in the Grinder explores meaning through sex, death, and time. We already are everything we will ever be.

  • Meer der Dünste (Sea of Vapors)

    A cascade of images cut frame by frame flow into an allegory of the lunar cycle.

  • La Estancia

    “Through a succession of subtly constructed tableaus, this powerful film is a profound critique of systematic oppression. Instigated by a massacre amidst a land-rights conflict in Paraguay, this haunting work transcends the local context to voice the struggle for essential freedoms.” — 60th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany, 2014)

  • MY WOUNDED HEAD

    A transwoman puts on makeup. The makeup and her movements are a metaphor for her transformation, as well as the dialectical revealing and concealment of herself from the scrutiny of the outside world. Taking its title from Marc Chan’s composition, MY WOUNDED HEAD is an experimental short film that investigates issues of representation, preconceived notions and reflexivity. Marc’s music, featured in the soundtrack, is itself a reflexive reinterpretation of a set of chorales from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O Sacred Head Now Wounded”).

  • SPANKIN

    An anagram of “napkins,” SPANKIN transposes the gay hanky code of the 70s onto contemporary coffee culture. Although humorous in content, SPANKIN is an allegory for hierarchical relations within minority groups, consumerist co-optation of identity, and the collective historical forgetting of repression and resistance. The older man has lived through it, the middle-aged man has heard about it and needs to look it up, while the young man is oblivious. Inspired by the criminalization of homosexual behaviour in Russia, India, Nigeria, and Uganda in 2013, SPANKIN revives the handkerchief code formulated during a similar period of suppression in North America…

  • ANCESTRIES

    An anagram of “resistance,” ANCESTRIES is a layered piece that encodes the dialectics of colonialism, de-sexualization, desire and resistance. An Asian is seduced by, and in turn, seduces a Caucasian whilst simultaneously reframing and performing two arias from Samson et Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns. ANCESTRIES suggests possibilities for resistance vs. outright rejection by having the Asian turn the colonized culture against itself. At the same time, it brackets the Western de-sexualization and feminization of Asian males (and high voices), while simultaneously exemplifying and subverting the stereotypes of submission. The use of male bodies also calls out the worship of hard,…

  • DELILAH JUKEBOX

    DELILAH JUKEBOX (aka DJ) toys with the notion of loops, repetition, and dichotomy like the A-B sides of a vinyl record. Delilah is not just a woman, she is the embodiment and projection of fear and fantasy; her name conjures diverse images and prejudices of the lover, the traitor, the fallen woman, the temptress, the patriot, and the vengeful, etc. Through a series of repetitions of Delilah’s aria “Printemps qui commence” (from the opera Samson et Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns) in a series of domestic spaces, male mezzo Stephen Chen explores the representation of the feminine by deconstructing and re-imagining…

  • The Natural State

    Inspired by the writings and philosophy of U.G. Krishnamurti, The Natural State is a visual essay on why we have only the present and our bodies. Spirituality, fear and consciousness are constructed by the continuity of thought.

  • The Lost World

    With the aid of a USB microscope and X-ray scanners, this time-based media installation peers into the surface structure of decayed and rotted 35mm celluloid film like a drone flight reconnaissance mission flying over unknown enemy territory. Inspired by electronic surveillance data and Second World War Allied bombing raids on Dresden, the microscopic camera behaves as the trained eye of the bombardier, looking manually into the active areas of the film frame.