Program

Yi-Ren is a collaged love letter made of various sources – super8mm diaries, karaoke videos, and found-footage from the films of Kang-Chien Chiu (1940-2013). It is also a queer reading of Chiu. As the line “my moans have a bit of Hollywood in them” suggests, our emotions would not exist without acting, or the movies we have seen.

A kaleidoscopic search for desire trapped inside a volcano. Famous Diamonds is a short film that studies lies, love, and desire by weaving together a diary narrative and an exploding icon. Composed of various image-making techniques, Famous Diamonds is a hand-painted, hand-processed tour of the dissolution of one’s internal image of desire.

Non-Stop Beautiful Ladies is a Los Angeles street film starring empty signs, radio from passing cars and human sign-spinners – some with a pulse and some without.

Callas Reloaded is a personal editing I made of a concert Callas gave at Covent Garden in 1964. All the musical parts have disappeared and the sound has been reworked: the diva remains alone on stage, almost without doing anything, to thunderous applause.

Powder Placenta is a fairytale that narrates the interconnectedness of seemingly separate spaces, spheres and strata, and shows how they desire to be intertwined. Longing has come to an end; the celebration of life in all its glory has begun.

In the film Mad Ladders, the prophetic ramblings of an unseen narrator recount fantastical dreams of the coming Rapture, as crystalline imagery of rolling clouds gives way to heavily-processed video of moving stage sets from The American Music Awards telecasts of the 1980s and early 1990s. Blooming and pulsing in and out of geometric abstraction, this swirling storm of rising curtains, spinning set pieces, and unveiled pop idols forms an occult spectacle, driven by its impassioned narrator and an 8-bit leitmotif. Like a half-remembered dream of mythology, television, and religion, the film strikes a hypnotic balance between storytelling and free falling. – Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago 2015