In a dim room filled with steam and mist, blurred figures of men are sipping the desire and loneliness from each other. You seem to have entered a forbidden zone and fallen into a state between dreaming and being awake, gazing at someone and also being gazed by them.
In the early 1980s, hundreds of the so-called female revenging/exploitation films were produced in Taiwan. The 2020 version was based on the old genre to recreate a fantasy of the bloody revenge. The film is one of Su Hui-Yu’s “Re-shooting” series, which re-visits historical sources in Taiwan during the old days around the 1970s-1980s while the country was under martial law governance.
Tide
Ocean, a boy who was born and raised on a small island, has a taboo relationship with Tide, a sailor whose ship regularly docks on the island. One day, when Tide's ship docks again, Ocean wants to tell Tide that he has convinced his mother to let him go sailing, but Tide has been concealing his marriage with a woman to Ocean and decides to end their romance.
A VIDEO ART WORK IN FIVE CHAPTERS.
1. Six young men walk into a forest in Taiwan, making close contact with ferns. They establish emotional and physical relationships with the plants, relying on their bodies rather than words. Ferns are very common in Taiwan. They are valued by indigenous people but not by Japanese colonists or the Nationalists.
2. A man makes love to a bird's nest fern and then starts eating it. Zheng reflects on our current moral outlook that it is “natural” to eat plants but “unnatural” to make love to them. Bird's nest fern is a popular delicacy in Taiwan.
3. Zheng collaborates with three local BDSM practitioners who in turn collaborate with three fern species to expand BDSM practice.
4. For centuries humans have been in love with furled fronds of young ferns. Inspired by Yaoi anime, this chapter follows a young couple in their acts of love with fiddleheads.
5. This chapter connects spores and sperms.
