Lichun Tseng

'Shunyata' means emptiness.This film reflects the stream of consciousness as a continuous flow of change and transformation. Shunyata is created by layering, constructing, and deconstructing 16mm film footage and analogue wave forms into an immersive, sense-transcending experience, one that through constant change and chaos evokes a sense of deep meditation and timelessness. A white cloud fades in the empty sky.

Who is moving? How do we start, continue and end? It is a search, research, and a process of the unknown and the unconscious; the full and the empty; the momentary and the eternal, which explores the space between the visible and invisible in reflection and connection.

Shot on Super 8, Cana Bilir-Meier's film portrays a group of migrant teenagers at the Olympia Shopping Center in Munich, where nine young people were killed in a racist attack in 2016. Beside their daily explorations, the teenagers restage scenes from the theater play Düşler Ülkesi (Land of Dreams). The premiere of the play in 1982 was overshadowed by a bomb threat. The contradiction in the film title of wanting to predict the past is a reference to the continuous experience of racism, but can also be read as a playful suggestion to break out of habitual patterns of thought and behavior—conveyed in the film through YouTube comments on Childish Gambino's song Redbone.

a journey of search; a search of journey

Different moments disappear and reappear, different moments come together to form a new moment. It is a decomposing and recomposing landscape inspired by the cycle of construction and deconstruction in nature.

“I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make a holiday of sensation”, writes Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet. Filmmaker Lichun Tseng embraced this idea in The Captured Light of an Instant. She captured many moments on 35 mm film, turning them into a layered experience in which time and place coalesce. Restlessness becomes concentration.

16mm, b&w, optical sound.

Change is a process, is the starting point equal to the end point? What if everything is in a flow, what meaning of value of life can be derived from the intercomnectedness of all things?

This film is inspired by a plant native to Australia, the grass tree. I was attracted by the slow growth of the trees,their spectacular figures and the ways in which their existence connects the land, the plant and the people. High contrast black and white film was used to capture and document the movement of the grass tree, as a way to reflect their visual poetry.