人在江湖 (out in the world)
2021 - 2022
(9:57, single-channel video)
music composed by Teddie Fitzpatrick
shown at:
Dazed x Circa Class of 2021 (excerpt)
SHOWstudio Fashion Film Review
Queer East Festival 2023
Kink In The Archive II
Babfilmfest
Composited over found footage of patrons eating out at Chinese restaurants, a latex-clad figure spins in tandem with the lazy susans commonly found, and used as an object of entertainment, in Chinese restaurants. The figure doubles as both a sculptural ideal placed upon a pedestal and a consumable object of communal amusement, eliciting a range of curious responses from the diners. The exaggerated, cartoonish and sometimes flirtatious performances that this fetishistic body brings out of its audiences, blur the line between derision and affection, othering and intimacy. In the second half of the film, a rupture occurs and with it, a chance for transformation beyond binaries.
A History of Rubber Commodities
2023
(5:20, single-channel video)
shown at:
WHITEHOUSE, Tokyo, Japan
Pretty Doomed, London
FLOP ERA, London
Somerset House CUTE commission
2024
(approx 1:30, single-channel videos)
shown at:
Somerset House, London
A series of five short videos responding to the five curated thematics of cuteness - Play Together, Sugar-Coated Pill, Monstrous Other, Hypersonic and Cry Baby.
The videos are of a shapeshifting dancer performing within the frame of a mobile phone, whilst inundated by pop-ups of cute-inspired popular culture that correspond with the theme of each cluster. Her performance and entanglement with these digital materials mirror the supercharged self-narrativising and hyperkinetic intensity of internet cute culture.
mommy
2022 (3:45, single-channel video)
music composed by Nick Sim
shown at:
Art in Flux: Radical Embodiment, Barbican Center
Kawaii Agency: Cursed Images
GGI Club
A styleGAN-generated video of poorly constructed latex fetish models, morphing in and out of existence, stands in the middle of a collage as if an altar. It is surrounded by flash cuts of legacy media's appropriation of latex fetishism, resembling apostles or disciples in this context. By placing these two different strands of latex fetish imageries in proximity, the hope is to provoke a deeper questioning of taste, subcultural origins, ambitions, image-construction, the balance between misogyny & empowerment, AI's capacity for perversity, and the power one can draw from the mother lake of fetishism.
The Very Thought of You
2022 (10:20, single-channel film)
performers:
Tan Ya
Ziyu Wang
crew:
Maite de Orbe
Ellie Koslowsky
Justin Chen
Jody Evans
Misetti Huth
Nick Sim
shown at:
Tour de Moon festival
London Short Film Festival, BFI
Fringe! Queer Film Festival
Set 10,000 years after the myth of Chang-E’s ascension onto the Moon, ‘The Very Thought of You’ centers around the hallucinatory experience of a Moon refugee who was broken out of his cryo-vacuum stasis by reasons unknown. In his helpless and delirious state, the man began wondering if he was really hearing the voice message of an ex-lover who he had to abandon in a bid for personal survival. The boundaries between freedom and restriction, past and present, individualism and collectivism, will blur and may even dissolve, in this dusky corner of the Moon.
Commissioned by Tour de Moon and UNBOXED.
44 Minutes, compressed into a lifetime
2021 (mixed presentations)
performer:
Luigi Abaño Acera
shown at:
Kawaii Agency at The Wrong Biennale
The goodest best boy Luigi as the most adorbz cat-maid(?)boy enduring the iconic thirst trap choreography of our times for 44 very cute, but sometimes torturous, minutes 🥺🐱
presentation for Kawaii Agency
the world beckons
2023 (31:00, single-channel video)
Archive of British life caught on analogue film seen through catastrophic waves. Commissioned for Breathing Underwater - an interdisciplinary arts event marking the publication of Weather Underwater (by Kaisa Saarinen). This video was projected over a live poetry reading programme.
shown at:
Breathing Underwater, Reference Point
excerpts from the video