8:59 min, colour, sound
Okui Lala, Malaysia

“Sew Eng is my mother. She is a tailor by profession and 40 years my senior. We sew together. Each with sewing machines of different operating systems, on a single piece of cloth placed between us.” (Okui Lala) Sewing & Sew Eng is Okui Lala’s first collaborative work. It was made in 2014 for the Good Malaysian Woman group exhibition in Publika, Kuala Lumpur. In this piece, Okui herself becomes both the subject and artist-performer as she attempts to negotiate with her mother in the creation of an artwork. Throughout the process, numerous questions and identities emerge: from the languages they spoke, the culture norm she was brought up in, to the notion of home that differs among generations.

Okui Lala is an artist and cultural worker. Her practice spans from video and performance to community engagement.  Okui’s projects tend to take on a collaborative or participatory approach, involving everyday people in her vicinity, including her family members, cultural workers, activists, and migrant workers. Past presentations include shows at Singapore Biennale, Para Site Hong Kong and National Art Gallery Malaysia. Okui also facilitates video workshops with nonprofit organizations, unions and different communities.

7:00 min, colour, sound
KOK Siew-Wai, Malaysia

The text serves as an artistic medium, a self-introduction and a contemplation of the role of language to the multi-lingual artist, who has the experience of living in two very different cultures: Malaysia and America. She is ethnically Chinese and a Malaysian citizen. She has studied and lived in USA for about 8 years in her 20s. This experience has a great influence on her as a young person. Through this living abroad experience, she has come to understand that for her, spoken language as a way to communicate has loads of limitations. Such restriction has inspired the artist to develop her unique personal language expressed through art, to connect with others beyond the limitation of spoken languages.

KOK Siew-Wai started out as an video artist, now active as an independent artist-curator/organizer and improvised vocalist. She lived and worked in the USA from 1998-2005. Siew-Wai has shown her video works and performed in Asia, Australia, Europe, Canada and USA, including Image Forum Festival 2019 (Japan), CTM Festival 2019 (Germany), Kaohsiung Film Festival 2018 (Taiwan), allEars Improvised Music Festival 2018 (Norway), Nusasonic 2018 (Indonesia), Singapore International Film Festival 2015, Asian Meeting Festival 2015 (Japan), Arkipel 2015 (Indonesia), International Film Festival Rotterdam 2007 (Netherlands), Beyond/In Western New York Biennial 2005 (USA) and many more.

5:41 min, b&w, sound
Chloe YAP Mun-Ee, Malaysia

This video essay examines the little thoughts on how we make sense of passing time; when we struggle with our work, our purpose in the world, and our connection with other people. I made this while making the transition as a film student to being an artist in the real world. Revisiting this work now helps me realise and make decisions about who I want to be and how I’d like to approach my future works in a way that’s most authentic to me.

Chloe YAP Mun-Ee (b. 1995) is an experimental filmmaker and video artist who is curious about the expressions of form, medium, identity, love, intimacy, as well as their hypocrisies and contradictions. Meanwhile she continues confronting and challenging her own shifting points of view by deploying the distorted wisdom of the audience in one way or another; impartiality is alright, but biased judgments are even better. Her latest work is a video installation, I Don’t Really Want You to See Me, But I Still Want to Show You (2022), where she confronts her fear and guilt towards the cinema image and the power dynamics within its space.

7:05 min, colour, sound
SIM Hoi-Ling & YEW Jun-Ken, Malaysia

The video is composed of streamed and uploaded footage from various online media platforms, exploring a binary alternation between the physical and digital, as they both coexist within a simulated space. The advent of virtual and augmented reality, as well as the constantly transforming nature of internet technology, paves the path for globalized, mentally interconnected experiences that blurs the boundaries between the natural and virtual. This synthesis of the two creates a new, somewhat “singular world”, to which people inch closer and closer toward.

Sim Hoi Ling is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is often influenced by photographic images, she enjoys exploring unconventional ways of image-making. She has exhibited works in the form of printmaking, video art, installation and performance, also presented internationally in festivals across Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. (hl-sim.wixsite.com/home) Yew Jun Ken is an independent artist from Malaysia, whose practice explores a variety of mediums and structures. From drawing and collage to sound and video, he takes inspiration from the psychedelic and surreal to convey narratives that relate to the nature of changing landscapes, whether it be the physical or metaphysical. (waishukun.tumblr.com)

1:03 min, colour, sound
SueKi YEE, Malaysia

“This started out as a “letter” to my family back in Malaysia. I wanted to capture various places in my life after moving to Kiel, Germany in 2021. Time flew by and suddenly it’s 2023, I’m moving away from Kiel, and I still haven’t sent the video. Looking back through these clips taken over 2 years, it was profound to think of everything I’ve lived through since migrating: 2 years that felt like 5 seconds, 2 years that felt like a whole lifetime. In the end, this became a “letter” not just to my family, but also to my future self.” (SueKi Yee)

SueKi Yee is a Malaysian dance artist who choreographs, performs, and teaches, and is currently based in Germany. With a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance (First Class Hons, 2017) from Aswara (the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage, Malaysia), her major is in contemporary dance, while also being trained in ballet, and various traditional Malaysian dance forms such as Bharatanatyam, Terinai, Zapin, Silat, etc. She was a soloist in ASK Dance Company from 2016-2019. In recent years, she’s also started experimenting beyond movement such as working with soundscapes, photo/videography, and text. Her works have been selected and presented in Malaysia, Mexico, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Brazil, and Ghana. Recent artistic residencies include PARALLEL Residency, Lernlabor Berlin (2021), and Perfocraze International Artist Residency in Ghana (2022).

5:20 mins, colour, sound
Raito LOW Jing-Yi, Malaysia/Taiwan

Blumentanz is an experimental object animation based on from Robert Schumann, using about 60 plants as female symbols to represents the state of romantic love. The growth of leaves and flowers is likened to a woman’s journey of love and intimate relationship. The animation symbolises the psychological changes of ‘women in love’, the exploration of possibilities and yearning for a “true love” that lasts a life time.

Raito Low Jing-Yi, an animation director from Malaysia based in Taiwan. Specializing in stop-motion animation, currently studying at NTUA MAA master’s program. She’s the director of Raito’s Art Studio. Adhering to the spirit of experimental animation, using plants as a medium to create visuals that combine humanities and nature. Personal work including <Fisso><Blüte><Blumentanz>, has been shortlisted in more than 100 film festivals.

5:20 min, colour, sound
NAKAZAWA Aki, Japan/Germany

“I was back in Tokyo on 8th of April, 2011 to attend my grandmother’s funeral. While mass media reported about the catastrophe and radioactive contamination, there were scenes directly in my eyes. Laughing people in the slightly darken city, a big demonstration and my family under cherry blossoms…. The vague weirdness and fear in the daily life are invisible but sensible now in the land of neon.” (Nakazawa Aki)

Born in 1976 in Tokyo, Aki NAKAZAWA lives and works in Cologne. As a curator and filmmaker, she is involved in various venues and forms of visual media, and also writes columns and other articles from her perspective in two cultures. ‘Drawing wishes’ (2006) was screened and awarded at Berlinale, WRO and other festivals around the world, and is in the collection of the City of Cologne.

5:00 min, colour, sound
NAKAZAWA Aki, Japan/Germany

As Covid19 is spreading, I temporarily return to Japan from Germany, in the surreal “migrant” trip.

Born in 1976 in Tokyo, Aki NAKAZAWA lives and works in Cologne. As a curator and filmmaker, she is involved in various venues and forms of visual media, and also writes columns and other articles from her perspective in two cultures. ‘Drawing wishes’ (2006) was screened and awarded at Berlinale, WRO and other festivals around the world, and is in the collection of the City of Cologne.

28:00 min, colour and b&w, sound
NGUYEN Trinh Thi, Vietnam

“Eleven Men” is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies — from 1966 to 2000 — were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. The film’s text was adapted from “Eleven Sons”, a short story by Franz Kafka first published in 1919, which begins with a father’s declaration: “I have eleven sons”, then describes each one of them in acute and ironic detail. Transposing the father’s voice of Kafka’s story, the film begins with a woman stating: “I have eleven men”.

Based in Hanoi, NGUYỄN Trinh Thi is a filmmaker and artist. Traversing boundaries between film, documentary, video art, installation, and performance, her practice currently explores the potential of sound and listening, and the multiple relations between the image, sound, and space with ongoing interests in history, memory, ecology, representation, and the unknown. Recent exhibitions include installations at documenta 15, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the 21st Biennale of Sydney, and the 13th Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale. Current exhibitions include Artes Mundi 10 (Wales), Thailand Biennale 2023, Singapore Art Museum, M+ (Hong Kong), and the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo). In 2009, Nguyễn founded Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and moving image in Hanoi.