April 1 – 4, 2014, Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre
The Scars of my City Director: Bianca LEI Sio Chong
The festival was divided into country blocks: South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau and Mainland China. Each section was curated by an invited curator, who got a free hand how to interpret the festival’s subtitle. I attended three of the six screenings – South Korea, Malaysia and Macau. As you can read below in detail, the screenings were quite different, depending on curators as well as on the country background.
South Korea, curated by Lee Hang Jun, mixed documentary-style (still experimental) with gallery-installation-style type works. The documentary-style works were more digestible to the eye, the other works were too long and tiresome for cinema viewing. Somewhere in between these two categories was “Winged Ant” by Seo Bo-Hyung, which stood out with its perfect cinematography and voiceover, professional as an Isaac Julien video installation.
Documentary-style: Heo Chul-Nyung “Measles Monster” based on a diary found in an abandoned house scheduled for demolition, Park Min-ha “A Story of Elusive Snow” a poetic documentary about fake snow in California, Park Byoung-Lae “Zeborieskie Point” mixing footage from an abandoned factory with footage from the Antonioni movie.
Artist-installation-style: Byun Jae-kyu “Photographic Survey” a documentary of glueing a pile of photos together – as the pile grows the image gets into the fixed focus area of the camera – great idea for an installation (video + actual object), but too long to watch twice the loop, once with a black screen and once with the timelapse video (both with same voiceover), Cho In-Han “February” a black and white formalist work, documenting changing shadows on a wall of a playground.
It was interesting that 2 of the 6 “Korean works” were made in the U.S.A., showing the close ties of South Korea with the U.S.A. and how this influences artist’s journeys/studies. I could not really make up my mind if this selection was representative of South Korea. Somehow I doubted it. There is so much video art coming out of South Korea, I have seen a share of it while wandering around Seoul’s galleries. This seemed like a small splinter in the sea of South Korean production.
Malaysia, curated by Kok Siew Wai, was quite different from the South Korean program, the documentary element was much stronger present, here more exactly described as a narrative element – there were basically a lot of video-stories. I was not so sure what was experimental about them. The story-videos were balanced out by a few formalist experiments with visual video effects, usually with a romantic/revolutionary undertone. “The social” was very present throughout the program – so much it felt like an educational program for a college screening. The curator smuggled in one of her own pieces as well, which seemed rather problematic to me, as it did not add anything that would justify its presence in the program.
The list: “Lulai” (Lim Chee Yong) about an indigenous group living in Malaysia, “Majidee” (Azharr Rudin) a touchy story of two strangers meeting at a bus station, “Mud Game” (Kok Siew Wai) a view of a construction site from the curator’s apartment, “A Day without Sun in Mengkerang” (Au Sow Yee) a fictional hippie story voiceover with palm beach imagery, “Kampung Haka” (Andrew Stiff) a romanticized call against destruction of an old Hakka village, “Mist” (Wong Eng Leong) a romanticized video-poem about people’s election demonstrations, “Memory and Ritual in Frame Difference” (Jason Bernagozzi) a romantic tourist video from a temple plus an Adobe Premier plugin effect on top, “Soli” (Adrienne Marcus Raja) a high-production value symbolic story about the Malaysian election failure.
I was neither keen on the social we-are-all-one-family rhetoric nor on the romantic camera experiments aestheticizing political problems. My favorite one was “Soli” (shot by an overseas Malaysian in Canada), which the curator revealed to be a symbolic representation of Malaysian politics, but it works well even without knowing this, it seemed more like a fairy tale into which everyone can read their own meaning. And it looked good. The curator mentioned how the not-so-democratic political situation in Malaysia influenced the works, which would be hard to see without her highlight. It seems to be difficult to talk openly about sensitive topics in Malaysia, and this was also reflected in this cliché-and-stereotype rich program.
Macau, curated by Bianca Lei Sio Chong, was the third screening I ventured to, and I was pleasantly surprised. It showed an ‘experimental’ variety as one would expect from the definition of the word. One could argue therefore that it was too classically ‘experimental’. But in the companionship of the previously mentioned screenings as well as the Hong Kong art scene, it was refreshingly experimental. Compared to the South Korean screening, I felt that it did indeed represent the ‘experimental’ scene in Macau by the diversity (within the niche) which it presented. Compared to the Malaysian screening, this was ‘professional’ experimental art (even though some of it was student’s work).
The list: “Vent-hole” (Ray Chu) about things coming out of holes in clothes – a poetic body-video-art, “Quarrel is like a revolution…” (Joein Leong) a hard to make sense of video of two guys arguing in a guitar shop, “The Scars of My City” (Bianca Lei Sio Chong) a bit long yet well-structured paper-cut animation of historical Macau photography, “Decomposition” a Dada-like performance where order turns into chaos (kind of criticism of ‘Chinese-type’ capitalism), Mies-en-scene (Joao O) a formalist yet very beautiful semi-abstract play with images and colors, The Pretender (Jose Drummond) a multi-channel video installation piece about search for love of Mainland Chinese women.
From this screening it is difficult to point out my favorite, as each work was a piece of a perfectly fitting whole. As careful readers noted, similar to the Malaysian program, the Macau program has been also curated by an artist-curator which managed to smuggle in a piece of hers. But in the case of Macau, I did not mind at all, as the piece “The Scars of my city” became almost like an anchor to the whole program. The Macau program was poetic, but not overly sentimental or didactically social, it was just right.