イメージフォーラム・フェスティバル 2020

Letter to T: in nuclearity, we are connected

ZHANG Zimu / digital / 21 min / 2023

Taking the form of a video letter, this visual essay ulitizes existing footage to examine nuclear testing in China and its visual images. China conducted its first nuclear test in Lop Nur, Xinjiang on October 16th, 1964, but the images conveying it include several “impurities.” The soldiers are overjoyed, but there is an “underside” to these images.

ZHANG Zimu
Zimu ZHANG is an environmental humanities scholar working on visual culture, eco-cinema and ecofeminist arts. She works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. She is also an alumna of DocNomads Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in documentary filmmaking (2012-2014) and Berlinale talents (2016).

Semiotics of the Home

Hsin-Yu CHEN, Jessi Ali LIN / digital / 8 min / 2023

A huge pile of garbage from demolished houses. A desk and chair placed in front of it. Food is prepared not by a person but by mechanical excavator used for construction. By performing human tasks such as cooking and doing laundry, the heavy machinery that builds our dwellings = way of life is freed from its original role. A work reminiscent of Martha ROSLER’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).

Hsin-Yu CHEN
Hsin-Yu CHEN is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with experimental film, documentary, and moving image to explore the liminal space between seeing and being seen where subjectivity is implicated and constructed. Drawing on border landscapes, embodied knowledge and the notion of measurement and categorization, he examines the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject.

Jessi Ali LIN
Jessi Ali LIN is an artist working with and through sculpture, video, performance, and embodiment. Her work exploits the notion of positionality both in terms of physical position and the multivalence of identity. Lin’s multifaceted practice examines the relationships between the performance of the self, its fragmented nature, and its location within the social and built environment.

In Your Shoes

Florence LAM, CHAN Tze Woon / digital / 30 min / 2024 《Award for Excellence》

Performance artist Florence LAM and filmmaker CHAN Tze Woon (Yellowing, Blue Island), who are lovers, each act out the experiences that have traumatized them. Memories of the pain associated with the female gender and body. Can two beings that differ in critical ways compromise and understand each other’s position? A personal film in which the closed-off feeling of “Hong Kong after that” weighs heavily on the viewer.

Florence LAM
Florence LAM is a Hong Kong-based performance artist and curator. She holds an MA from Iceland Academy of the Arts and a BA from Central Saint Martins. Lam has performed internationally, including at M+ (Hong Kong 2023) and ZABIH Festival (Ukraine 2019) etc., re-performed for Marina Abramovic’s retrospective in 2018, and co-founded Hong Kong-based live art platform Per.Platform in 2021.

CHAN Tze-woon
CHAN Tze-woon is a Hong Kong-based filmmaker whose works explore personal memories and identity, challenging the boundaries between documentary and fiction. His films have been selected for international film festivals in Rotterdam, London and Busan. Tze-woon has won the OGAWA Shinsuke Award at the Yamagata International Documentary Festival, as well as the Best Documentary Award at the HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

DESK BUGS

KIM Hakhyun / digital / 23min / 2024 《SHIBUYA SKY Award》

Centered on fluffy purple “desk bugs,” all sorts of objects, including a red desk, a yellow dog, a skull, and a modular synthesizer cable, dance freely in time to the music by the filmmaker.
Dynamic motion of lines and colors emerge through the use of tiny pictures. A work filled with the fun of animation.

KIM Hakhyun
Animation artist. Assistant professor at the Department of Animation, Faculty of Arts, Tokyo Polytechnic University. Selected filmography: “MAZE KING” (2013), “Jungle Taxi” (2016), “RED TABLE” (2021), “WHITE PHONE CALL” (2023), “DESK BUGS” (2024).

The House with Nobody

KITAGAWA Miku / digital / 15min / 2024 《Award for Excellence》

The house where grandma used to live now stands empty. The warmth of the sunlight shining through the windows into the veranda and living room and the occassional sound of the train grandma used to like provoke homesickness. When the sun finally sets, “beloved cat Jiro-chan” saunters into the house. A work overflowing with the emotions of remembering grandma in which the traces of a life are made to linger in a calm, peaceful space through the use of stop-motion and compositing.

KITAGAWA Miku
Born in Ishikawa Prefecture. Graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University with a major in Expression Communication. In her second year, she took a leave of absence to travel to the United States and study filmmaking at UCLA Extension.
In 2020, her first first feature-length project, “KANAKO,” won a Special Mention at Talents Tokyo.