IP Yuk-Yiu

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

ANOTHER DAY OF DEPRESSION IN KOWLOON is a virtual study and a digital portrait of Hong Kong as seen through the lens of contemporary popular culture incarnated in the forms of video game and screen media. Using the map “KOWLOON” from the popular video game CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS (2010) as a field of study, the filmmaker conducted a yearlong virtual fieldwork: playing, observing and documenting “Hong Kong” as simulated in the video game world. ANOTHER turns the violent first-person shooter into a series of vacant, uncanny and yet meditative tableaux, unearthing a formal poetry that is often overlooked during the original gameplay. It combines methodologies from both the observational and assemblage film traditions in raising questions about cultural representations in contemporary popular media, while at the same time creating evocative metaphors for a post-colonial Hong Kong through the reworking of media materials.

Shot over a three-month period, PANIC ROOM documents a small Tokyo apartment before and after the East Japan earthquake and the ensuing nuclear outbreak in 2011. The ordinary apartment, a seemingly uneventful domestic space, suddenly becomes a mirror of both a collapsing physical reality and a shaken personal state, creating an intertwining parallel between the external and the psychological that reflects the panicking times of the great catastrophe.

A kaleidoscope of self-devouring autoeroticism.

WE WANT ANGEL restages the final showdown of Sam Peckinpah’s Western classic THE WILD BUNCH (1969) as a loop of endless shootouts. Cutting and mapping images from the heroic finale in real-time with custom software, Peckinpah’s final shootout is transformed into a psychedelic orgy of fetishistic self-destruction that borders between the sublime and the mundane. The never-ending cycles of senseless killings mirror and unwind the obsessive-compulsive disorder of (male) destructive heroism/eroticism that haunts the history of narrative cinema.

Hong Kong / 2002 / Video / Color / Sound / 19min

THE MOON is a literal remake of the Hollywood blockbuster LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING (1955), starring Jennifer Jones and William Holden. Stripping the images and sound from the original film, the remake retains only the film dialogues in the form of subtitles, rendering the original romantic tale into a hollow and ghostly story. The film dialogues, taken out-of-context and dissociated from the original images, become an allegorical conversation about displacement, alienation and cultural representations.

Recycling a scene from a D.W. Griffith short, THE GRIFFITH CIRCLE explores the enigma of the cinematic space that dominated classical film practices for over a century. It turns a simple and often neglected act of screen direction into a playful meditation on spatial construction and a symbolic game of cinematic “hide and seek”.

notes before the revolution is the first part of a film diary series postcards from Hong Kong. It documents the passing of the filmmaker’s father and the fateful historical changes of Hong Kong in the turmoil years of 1996-98. Personal and social events intertwined, destined to become parallel metaphors for each other. To record the personal is to make a testimony of time and space that is particular, lived as well as historical.

CLOUDS FALL is a series of virtual tableaux, a speculative portrait of life on earth after mass destruction and its violent aftermath.

The Plastic Garden summons the ghost of a forgotten future, the grim fatality of a total nuclear war that held the world hostage half a century ago.