In this screening, M+ Cinema presents three of Hong Kong moving image artist Yau Ching’s works from the M+ Collection, a sixty-minute talk session with the artist herself as well as Film About a Woman Who… by American director Yvonne Rainer. Yau will discuss the ideation and creation of her three works and share how Yvonne Rainer’s film had deeply influenced her career.

The talk session with Yau Ching will be conducted in Cantonese and English.

Chinese subtitles

M+, Hong Kong

Loosely structured as a video letter, Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You About? explores the relationship between historical memory, desire, migration, and gender construction. The images in this short film are excerpted from movies, travel shows, archival government footage, and historical photographs, and are accompanied by a monologue performed by Sikay Tang.

Chinese & English subtitles

M+, Hong Kong

Yau Ching further interrogated the notion of unstable identity in Flow. In it, Yau asks more open-ended questions, but this time to a real person called Hou Wenyi, a Chinese artist who was exiled to the United States after the Cultural Revolution and who lived next door to Yau in New York City. Through a highly reflexive approach, and in the form of personal documentary, the film’s narrative expresses moments of anxiety but also exhilaration, as the two Chinese female artists see in each other the possibilities and limitations of a self in another life.

Chinese & English subtitles

M+, Hong Kong

The Ideal Na(rra)tion is a pioneering example of Hong Kong independent music videos. The music is performed by Blackbird, a politically oriented underground rock band founded by Lenny Kwok Tat-lin in 1984. The video’s archival footage is artistically edited and used in an abstract and emotive way. It combines government propaganda and other found images and text to address how those materials were instrumentalised by the State to discipline people’s emotions and psyches.

Yvonne Rainer’s iconic Film About a Woman Who… is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.

Rainer deeply influenced Yau Ching’s career. In Ching’s words, ‘the first time I watched Film About a Woman Who...was more than thirty years ago. It opened a space for me which dismantled many preconceptions regarding movement, narrativity, realism, use of text, art and discourse, citations and characters. It was not until I became her student that I came to more fully realise the extent of the hardship and perpetual self-questioning involved in the dismantling, not to mention opening.’