film
Within a ghostly silk forest, a world within worlds, the labor of Chinese factory workers and silkworms are evoked through a satiric reimagining of the Chinese mythology of the Silk-Worm Horse. The work questions censorship, self-censorship, orientalization, and self-orientalization within the context of global late capitalism.
A multi-media work comprised of a split- screen video and a live performance, embodying the paradoxical tensions central to my work as an immigrant artist: How can I authentically tell my stories to an inherently foreign audience, and must I be consumed by the American gaze? Interweaving footage filmed in factories in my mother's hometown in Jiangxi province with found footage from Silk Museums, clashing Chinese legends against its necessarily false English translation, I interrogate the Western viewer: how are you complicit in the orientalization of my homeland? But mostly, I ask myself, how is my lens inherently complicit and a part of this “othering” gaze?
In America, You Are Asked Why Are Leaves Green
Writer, Director
5:38, video, color
Premiered at The Immigrant Artist Biennial
2020 Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
Official selection for Prague International Indie Film Festival
The camera and I are outsiders inside the women* café, a temporary safe space for refugee and migrant women. We look out onto the open expanse of Tempelhof, a former Nazi airport turned beloved public park, home to Germany’s largest refugee camp. We do not understand German, or French, or Farsi, or Arabic. The boundaries of the café are clear— those outside look in, those inside remain hidden. The camera and I are intruders. The insiders and the outsiders learn the legal borders that keep those inside, out.
Women* Café at Welcome Festival
Writer, Director
5:38, video, color
Premiered at "Borders in a single shot":
after Farocki, Harun Farocki Institut,
2017 Berlin
In an ink-washed landscape, the poetic short film shot on 16-mm imagines the rebirth of the heavens and the earth, under which disappearing traditional craftsmanship such as boluo lacquer, bamboo marque, zitan carving is revitalized and married with contemporary design.
ORIGINE
Writer, Director, Producer
5:39, 16-mm, color
Mandarin, English, Italian
Premiered at Ferrari 30 Years in China, 2023
Commissioned by Ferrari Global
You Still Have Something
of The Ghost About You
Writer, Director, Producer
5:07, video, color
English
Premiered at virtual film festival “ctrl + v”
The cento-film "You Still Have Something of the Ghost About You" was shot in the hauntingly empty casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in Macau, China after I left government quarantine and realized I’d stumbled into the underworld. The polyvocal collage slips the viewer into an otherworldly, post-COVID globalized hypnosis: interweaving strangely prescient texts from Chinese and Western epics such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Beastiary, Dante’s Inferno, and contemporary texts such as John Cage’s X, and Gu Cheng’s Ying’er, to journey into the afterlife of forgetfulness.
Rancid, Familiar
Writer, Director, Producer
3:55, video color
Premiered at virtual film festival “ctrl + v”
A haptic and uncomfortable exploration of the evolving and unspoken intimacies between father and daughter set in the midst of a global pandemic—the film embodies how the sensory deprivation of quarantine governance and the epistemic entrapment of surveillance capitalism bleeds into intimate relationships. How, through the body’s desire to mirror one’s parent, one can never truly be seen by those closest to them.
Flowers on Both Sides
Writer, Director, Actor
10:30, color, video
Through a startling and humorous exploration of using the I-Ching to decide on what to have for breakfast tomorrow, the family of three meditates on familial relations under the one child policy, and the taboos of intimacy, superstition, and translation in China and Macau.
My Dear, What Are You Afraid Of?
Writer, Director
4:33, color, video
A Video-poem made in response, and out of frustration, to the escalating cold-war tensions between U.S.— China in 2020. A sardonic break-up letter that spirals into a piercing critique of the two countries’ never-ending and frivolous ping-pong- match relations.