Date: 5 July, 2024, 8pm (EST)
Venue: Le Petit Versailles, 247 East 2nd St, New York, NY 10002-1106, USA

We are honoured to present a video programme over the cloud to be screened at the Le Petit Versailles, New York City community garden in the Lower East Side neighborhood. Founded in 1996 by artists Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, the Le Petit Versailles Garden regularly holds calls for proposals for artistic works or events and hosts community events such as exhibitions, readings, live performances, and film screenings.

“Passage of Time” is a special program from KLEX Festival (Malaysia), featuring cinematic works by nine female media and multidisciplinary artists from Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The works range from stop-motion animation, video performance, and diary film/home video, to found footage and video essay, interpreting the notions of “time”, “change” and “transformation”. The artists explore subject matters such as family, history, cultural identity, generational differences, self-reflexivity, loss and grief, memory, internal vs external reality, physical vs virtual reality, literature, and film language. The selection of artists consists of young adults and mature women, providing a range of perspectives and contemplations on various concerns from artists of different generations and backgrounds. (Curator: Siew-Wai Kok)

Total Run Time: 81 minutes

eggshells
TEO Wei-Yinn [2023, 8:15 min, colour, sound, Malaysia]
Woken by odd sounds of leaves and a machine, I found myself witnessing the foliage out my window being cut down. There was a profound sadness that felt so familiar, like grieving an egg that was cracked abruptly open, lost. Meanwhile, leaf after leaf attached to their trees, fallen to the ground before turning brown. Eggshells is an audiovisual diary pieced by phone videos taken out of my obsession with the window view in my newly rented apartment, woven together with analog photos documenting the moments of my parents moving out of our old rented house after I left home. The work mirrors the ruins of nature and the ruins of my family home, exploring the duality and coexistence of living and decay.

Sewing & Sew-Eng
Okui Lala [2014, 8:59 min, colour, sound, 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.

Language of Self
KOK Siew-Wai [2011/2014, 7:00 min, colour, sound, Malaysia]
Concept: 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.

How My Brain Makes Sense of Passing Time
Chloe YAP Mun-Ee [2017, 5:41 min, b&w, sound, 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.

*placetheearthbeneathyou
SIM Hoi-Ling & YEW Jun-Ken, [2017, 7:05 min, colour, sound, 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.

Tour de Kiel
SueKi YEE [2023, 1:03 min, colour, sound, Malaysia/Germany]
“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)

Blumentanz
Raito LOW Jing-Yi [2022, 5:20 mins, colour, sound, 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.

Neon no kuni/Land of Neon
NAKAZAWA Aki [2011, 5:20 min, colour, sound, 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)

WATARIDORI
NAKAZAWA Aki [2021, 5:00 min, colour, sound, Japan/Germany]
As Covid19 is spreading, I temporarily return to Japan from Germany, in the surreal “migrant” trip.

Eleven Men
NGUYEN Trinh Thi [2016, 28:00 min, colour and b&w, sound, 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”.