Karimah Ashadu 

Kobby Adi

Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Dara Birnbaum

Zheng Bo

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Nate Boyce

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Monster Chetwynd

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Tony Cokes

Stephanie Comilang

Alex Da Corte

Jeremy Deller

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Samia Halaby

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Rei Hayama

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Miyu Hosoi

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

AKI INOMATA

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Eisa Jocson

Joan Jonas

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Tang Kwok-Hin

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien

Quỳnh Lâm

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Sarah Morris

Takeshi Murata

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Thao Nguyen Phan

Wong Ping

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Ingrid Pollard

Kobby Adi & Nina Porter

Walid Raad

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

James Richards

Robert Sandler

Aki Sasamoto

Jacolby Satterwhite

Shimabuku

Tiffany Sia

Julian Simmons

P. Staff

Angela Su

Martine Syms

Falling in Reverse

b. 1990, Hong Kong; lives and works in Hong Kong. 

Nicole Wong’s practice isn’t limited to a single media. Working across film, video, installation, objects, sculpture and other visual media, she is guided by a process-oriented methodology. Wong delves into philosophical themes such as the nature of time, the fragile link between language and materiality, and the challenges and limits of human communication. Her works, often subtle and understated, encourage quiet reflection by resonating with shared human emotions and longings. Through clever use of puns, word-play and a linguistic revelry, she layers meanings and attunes her attention to the space between literal and symbolic interpretations. By incorporating everyday items and familiar materials, she navigates the field of semiotics, probing how the form of a sign relates to its meaning.

For further information about this artist please click 

Nicole Wong

假作真時真亦假,
無為有處有還無。

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real

—Cao Xueqin, 紅樓夢/ 

Do you remember that day up on stage? Your left hand in mine, your right clapped over your mouth. The world, it spun, but when I turned to you, I saw it all clearly. Crystals at the tips of your nails. The gape of your mouth, widening in the spotlight. Sobbing, but your bangs still disconcertingly intact. Hairspray gloss. The shock. Coloured contacts dilating your eyes, wide and round and green. Mirroring the audience. Their cooing. Screaming. Your wrist waving limply. This happens. Season after season of reality shows to assemble the cutest girl group, the most alluring boy idols.

A story like this, to be feasible, has to come to an end. The camera pans. We made it. Across the stage, a mid shot of other eliminated contestants, folding to the floor in distress. I shut the browser. YouTube ad, stifled. The glare of my bedroom lamp against the laptop screen. My legs. Scraping the softness of the duvet. Worn soft by leisure. Watching 

, which is a 2024 survival reality competition created by Mnet in collaboration with Teddy Park’s The Black Label. A cast of adolescent BLACKPINK hopefuls. Stern but loving mentors, stalwarts in the K-pop industry. Only six spots in the group. Not everyone gets to debut. Not everyone gets to have a promising career as an artist. But some do.

The theatre of reality TV is founded in formula. Part of a long tradition of melodrama, after all – composed of tropes and patterns that in their arbitrary combination and recombination are engineered to automatically provoke an emotional response within me. Even, or perhaps especially, when exaggerated or absurd. So I cry. I am not on stage, pining for a glittering future. I am not a contestant in a survival programme. Not even a teenage girl, not anymore. I get up and trip over my disgruntled cat, trying to brush the crumbs from my sheets.

But your nails in my palm. I still feel them. I raise my hand to brush confetti from my cheek. ‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ you say, trembling. On the brink of a dream come true. ‘It’s different now that it’s real.’

I swoon. Weak for it. I can’t resist falling head first into its obliterating embrace. 

The artist and filmmaker Tao Hui would understand, known as he is for mobilizations of sentimentality, in which he appropriates and intervenes into cross-temporal mediums of melodrama, from nostalgic C-drama to TikTok, live streams to classical Chinese texts. Inhabiting a Tao Hui piece is to subject oneself to involuntarily gripping constructions of intimacy while hyperaware of being dangled on the fishhook of mass media.

, a group of actors are tasked with re-performing emotionally charged scenes from Chinese television, culled from programmes ranging from reality TV to C-drama to news features. The original version of said programme plays soundlessly in the background – on a monitor or screen, sometimes projected into another section of the frame. Because of the omnipresence of media in our lives, this doesn’t feel remarkable. The flat screen running a drama on mute above the counter of a boba shop. A movie set up for projection in the park. Still, watching along is a little akin to materializing the disorienting feeling of having subtitles out of sync – especially since the spoken dialogue between the actors in the foreground often precedes the soundless moving of the characters’ lips behind them. Until a dramatic breath or unintended stumble in the actors’ delivery means the TV version once again takes the lead. Until a burst of speed in an actress’s impassioned monologue means her counterpart, mouth a stuttering goldfish-O, begins to lag. No temporal consistency. These actors’ re-embodiment of an extant visual script that yet continues to play unevenly alongside them produces a chaotic, unstable interplay between image and body, avatar and sound. What’s realer? It seems that Tao Hui is ambivalent. Indeed, he stipulates there be no set order to how these scenes are curated or viewed; rather, they can be scrambled, so long as each scene is played only once within the sequence. Without a clear sense of origin, what Tao creates is a cinematic topology in which there is no hierarchy or boundary between reality and fantasy, living and acting. Rather, all these layers, reinforcing and contradicting one another within an edgelessly mutable affective field.

One might assume that these amalgamated displacements would alienate the viewer from the emotional heart of each interaction. Coolly extract the charge from each scenario. And yet, watching 

, I still can’t help but cry. I cry even though I am not the woman on her knees in the restaging of the 

, sobbing for the forgiveness of her parents. All three of them devastated by the way she’s let her wayward lover mistreat her. I am not the athlete facing down the press to account for a serious injury right before the Rio Olympics. But Agustín Zarzosa writes that melodrama’s formally sublimated hysterics – its high artifice, the rigid symbolism of cinema – afford the viewer some relative safety and distance in order to unconsciously access their secret selves. I am not an actor, but when I watch Tao’s prismatic facsimiles of people experiencing the kinds of contradictory feelings that coincidentally collide with my own, perhaps I am, as Zarzosa writes, not watching them so much as ‘finding [aesthetic] pleasure in the private observation of [my] own suffering’.

Strikingly, even when the quivering mouths on the TV screen and the voices of the actors in the foreground barely ever sync up, their gestures always do. A slap to the face of a cheating lover. A hand on the heart, appealing to a yearned-after crush. A forehead dropping down into a set of proffered hands. This punctuating physicality always perfectly timed, as if to drive home the fact that, within the fluctuating currents of 

, no matter where and to whom emotions are occurring – love, filial piety, pain – they are undyingly, unquestionably true.

So I cry. Because I might not be the aspiring pop star in the reality singing programme 

, honouring the sacrifices her mother has made to raise her into the talented young woman she is today. I am not the actress playing her, either, thanking not an audience of hundreds but a few empty chairs in a community auditorium. But I can’t help it. Watching both women sing through their tears, I cry. A childhood photo of the aspiring pop star crawls up the background. Her mother then, young and beautiful, arms wrapped around her tiny form. Gap-toothed, pink headband. Her mother now, fond and weary-faced, clapping for her in the crowd, bathed in pink stadium lights. Because these are insert shots, they look like artificial memories being hallucinated by the ‘real’ actress standing in front of the screen. The overlay of what could be and what is, a dream fulfilled and a dream emergent, compounding the strength of my own feeling. Mama loves her so much. She’d do anything in her power to make things possible for her. She cries; I cry because deep down, I know that these memories, they belong to me.

So what? Seductive as it is, intense emotion, especially when isolated to the locus of an individual subjectivity, is never inherently subversive. Indeed, in 

, there is an aspirational, didactic undercurrent to its melodramatic narratives that feels as discomfiting as it is sentimentally urgent. Indeed, formulations of love and deep feeling here are not solely relegated to the province of romance but extend to social ideals and concerns that border on the propagandistic. A child from the ‘Heart to Heart’ Art Troupe speaks about his deep love and gratitude for the elders throughout the country (his ‘aunts, uncles, grandmas and grandpas’) who have supported him as a victim of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. A film star, Ko Chen-tung, embroiled in a marijuana scandal laments how he has betrayed the love and concern of his fans. Above him, a popular children’s cartoon hovers on a screen, as if indicating to the viewer that this is a lesson to learn. He is a cautionary tale.

Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China

, he describes how China’s late 1970s transition into global neoliberalism meant it was in the state’s interest for Chinese subjects to reframe their idealized notions of love. Rather than the previous state-sanctioned ‘revolutionary romanticism’, in which citizens’ individual interests were subordinated to the government’s socialist cause, the administration encouraged subjects to cultivate ‘agential selves motivated to seek familial opulence and prosperity in market competition’.

 Zhang raises the example of the popular dating show 

, in which young professionals go through a series of challenges to help them find a perfect spouse. Meant to enable these young men and women to become romantically and emotionally fulfilled, the series instead uses the spectacle of mass media to align the characteristics and qualities of an ideal partner with ‘private property ownership, upward mobility, and endurable heteronormative intimacy’.

It is through the reproducible quality of melodrama that 

 reveals to us, as Zhang describes, how state forces can become insidiously woven into the affective apparatus of love, shaping its viewers’ desires and aspirations so these better align with the needs of the neoliberal state. We get the sense that the actors are interpellated by or seem to be unconsciously modelling what the original TV programmes are espousing – whether in the way of hard-earned success, heterosexual romance or reproductive futurism. This is compounded by the fact that the actors participating in the re-enactment of scenes often seem more like ‘regular’ citizens, ripe and ready for instruction. Dressed casually and not shrouded by the aura of hair and makeup, nor glamorized by costume or style, they could be students or retirees or office workers. They occupy settings that appear to be public spaces of quotidian life and learning – community centres, school auditoriums, classrooms, coffee shops, parks.

Still, there is an aura of the ill-fitting, a gawkiness of the emergent that permeates 

 and suggests that its actors’ re-embodiments in fact fail to fit into their idealized templates. That they can’t live up to the unattainable standards of their originals. Indeed, even though the actors often speak first and occupy the foreground of the shot, the highly produced nature of television – its artful editing of close-ups and wide-angles, its colour correction and audience shots – means that the viewer’s eye is often drawn towards the original TV programme playing in the background. What is manufactured appears strangely more naturalistic. In contrast, the actors’ exchanges, filmed as a single mid shot, appear static, stilted. The incongruence of their soap-opera dramatics jammed into a banal setting. Their theatrical language highlighted by the plainness of the frame.

Sometimes, the re-enactments feel more like crude imitations, involving inferior props or markers that seem to suggest the actors inhabit different social or class positions than their televised counterparts. Meaning there is a sense of the surreal, the absurd to these inconsistencies. For example, in the re-enactment of a scene from the classic 1994 C-drama romance 

), a marriage proposal between a couple that originally takes place originally in a luxury car, accompanied by a vibrant bouquet, is restaged on a public transit train alongside a single, bedraggled rose. Similarly, in the scene from the 2014 reality show 

, in which real-life childbirth is televised, the original programme includes the subtitled voices of family and medical staff off-screen, supporting the labouring mother, tenderly stroking her forehead. In the re-enactment, the actress is alone in a small apartment, accompanied only by a merrily steaming humidifier in place of a wailing baby.

A hallmark of melodrama is that its characters are unable to truly face, let alone address the root cause of their emotional suffering – instead, they end up cleaving to socially directed trajectories that lead them to false happy endings. Similarly, in 

, we get the uncanny feeling that a wealth of its subjects’ potentially heterogeneous experiences have been truncated, squeezed into the oversimplified patterns of melodrama’s homogeneity. And even though the emotional stakes of each situation always feel vital, the context or logic behind their intensity seems ambiently obscured, unable to be entirely understood. Perhaps 

’ most sinister element is its exposure of popular media’s role not just in modelling but 

 generic, state-sanctioned formulations of ambition, love and desire – that nonetheless are experienced by subjects as private, singular, true.

Another word for what is scripted but whose mechanism remains obscured is fate. When I was a child, I was obsessed with the 1987 TV series 

, adapted from the eighteenth-century classic Chinese novel of the same name, and a scene of which is re-enacted in 

. Following the fortunes, both good and ill, of the wealthy, aristocratic Jia family, the plot revolves around a love triangle composed of the protagonist, Jia Baoyu, the male heir of the Jia family, and his cousins Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai. An air of predestination drapes luxuriously over the narrative: Baoyu, reincarnated from a stone and sent to the human realm to learn more about the joys and sufferings of human existence; Daiyu’s previous incarnation, owing Baoyu a debt of tears; Baoyu, born with a jade in his mouth whose inscriptions perfectly match the golden locket that Baochai has carried since childhood. The characters’ fates are foretold from the outset: Lin Daiyu will tragically die, Baoyu and Baochai will marry, and Baoyu will eventually become a monk.

Suffering as I was with the usual afflictions of girlhood, I found immense comfort in the idea that the melodrama rendered on-screen was in service of a captivating narrative; I loved the pleasure of knowing the end. Even if it was senselessly tragic, excessively melancholy, it at least served a kind of cathartic resolution. Everything in its place. Because of this, I desired to grasp myself through the image of one of the two heroines in 

. If I accomplished this, then clearly I would understand my own life’s purpose. So I conducted meticulous studies, comparing my granular characteristics to those of Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai, but I wasn’t a right fit for either type. Much like Lin Daiyu, to whom I related more, I had a severe respiratory illness. A sarcastic, nihilistic streak. But I did not possess her frail build, nor her temperamental nature. Undeniably, however, I had Xue Baochai’s voluptuous build and rosy complexion, large eyes. Her social adeptness and people-pleasing impulses. This inability to conform to either template of ideal classical Chinese femininity distressed me. Everywhere I looked, I saw my difference. In the flabbiness of my hips when Daiyu’s were dainty. In my salty retorts to classmates, not at all possessed of Baochai’s tact or restraint. In the desperate crush I developed on the tall, netball-playing girl I tried not to glance at from my shadowy corner of the schoolyard.

Most of all, I resented how constantly observing my difference denied me the clarifying pleasure, the relief, of being fated.

instigates, and is, to me, where its radicality lies. Refusing to simply relegate its participants wholesale to the formulaic resolutions, the falsely tidy endings of either melodrama or the state, it instead pulls apart the process of replication. By illuminating, indeed enhancing the failures of its actors to successfully emulate the original TV show, it lures viewers into a state of heightened awareness to difference. And as we track the discrepancies between the original programmes and their re-enactments, we begin to notice other kind of aberrancies within each scene that are less easily interpreted, explicable or assimilable. For example, in the original altercation between a woman and her cheating lover from the 2013 drama 

, the couple is interrupted by a beautiful white woman, ostensibly the male character’s new lover. But in the re-enactment she has disappeared. What about the partial TV screen in the far-left corner of Ko Chen-tung’s drug scandal apology scene, playing what appears to be a period C-drama? Is this in any way related to the fact that Ko’s image is to be eventually recuperated, not by community service or any material restitution but through his role as a patriotic police officer during the Japanese occupation? Not to mention – in the proposal scene from 

, the artist Tao Hui himself is named as the reason that the couple meet up. Intentional? In the original script? I have no idea. But it doesn’t matter. These questions and hesitations give me pause, are enough to disrupt the cathartic pleasures of melodrama. Shock me out of my complacence in accepting any generically assigned fate.

In her essay ‘Disambiguation, a Tragedy’, Nan Z. Da points out that Chinese victims of the Cultural Revolution have difficulty telling the stories of their oppression ‘without resorting to hyperbole and melodrama’, because after prolonged exposure to propaganda, they no longer have recourse to any other expressive vocabulary. Da calls upon the literary critic’s skills of disambiguation to locate, within these victims’ narratives, the ‘crucial, if finely drawn, difference between being forced to say what you do not believe and being left with no logical way to say what you 

 In other words, Da proposes it might not be possible to exactly unearth the essential or ‘real’ truth beneath the exaggeration of a state narrative. But cultivating the practice of observing difference, of discernment, when encountering those narratives can itself serve as a mode of resistance towards state apparatuses.

, the more I am compelled to point out incongruities that emerge. Not just between what is on-screen and what is being re-enacted, but in terms of what has been added or subtracted, underscored or faded away. Tao activates our desire to dwell within those interstitial points of inaptness as a means of pointing towards what lies beyond the frame; invites us to see or speculate differently, even if it might be lonely. It’s up in the air as to whether we can ever or entirely escape the surveillance or interpellation of the state. But can these insolvable ambiguities, spawned by a process of imperfect replication, create gaps for subversion? 

 proposes a practice of disambiguation as the first step towards the kind of phenomenological nonconformity that might allow us to intervene within or flinch from state narratives, even while still trapped in the clutches of our unfettered emotion. Its unreality. Its –

Surface. Antidote. The slippery black sheen of the floor beneath our feet. Moving. Unmoving. The thing is that it’s poison. The way you lean forward. Suddenly excited. Vaguely, I hear the elimination music play, a saccharine, sentimental echo. The thing is that there’s crying. There’s always crying underneath. Our shared sense of the future. Behind us. Someone shrieking. And you in that dress, making your angles protrude. Looking geometric. Looking flat. Roundness in your face. Trembling next to me. The air around you pulsating, like a caress.

Your nails in my palm. I still feel them. I raise my hand to brush confetti from my cheek.

‘It’s real, isn’t it,’ you say, smiling sweetly. On the brink of a dream come true. ‘Right now. This is real. Because wouldn’t it be tragic? If it weren’t?’

The world hazy, like through a lens. Through blue tinted glass. I tilt my head to the sound of a voice. Sounding wispy. Not my own. Sounding impossible.

The sensation of being watched intensely. ‘Who cares if it’s real?’ I say. ‘I can feel that it’s different.’

Notes

Biographies

It’s different now that it’s real: Disambiguating Tao Hui’s 'Joint Images'

Joint Images

screening

 (2023), an oyster’s viscous fluid seeps and oozes to a soundtrack of vaguely oriental instrumentals intermingled with the sounds of squelching and squishing as a human finger uncomfortably pokes at its fleshy yellow body in search of a pearl. Fan, best known for his anthropomorphic sculptures made of delicate materials like glass and resin, collaborated with scientists to cultivate oysters native to Hong Kong. Grounded in the biological fact that the bivalves produce pearls in response to foreign irritants – secreting an iridescent nacre that, in effect, fossilizes the intruder – Fan inserted silicone cutouts of Chinese characters that form the phrase ‘Pearl of the Orient’, Hong Kong’s colonialist moniker, into the oysters’ shells, prying them open three years later to see them encrusted in their opalescent mantles. ‘I want it to swallow its own name,’ Fan insidiously offers. Using tweezers to surgically implant the animals with the synthetic material, he enacts the postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s theory of internalized oppression, a process by which colonized individuals unconsciously absorb the dehumanizing beliefs of their oppressors. 

As the video unfolds, Fan overlays a series of subtitles onto the moving images: ‘C is for Contamination. C is for Culture. C is for Consumption. C is for Class. C is for Cyclical. C is for Capital. C is for Colony.’ The litany of statements beginning with the letter ‘C’ functions as a rhythmic polemic against the aspirational vision of Hong Kong as a deracinated commercial hub. Interspersed among the closely cropped shots of the oysters’ manipulated bodies, Fan splices in scenes ofthe gleaming metropolis – the perfectly sculpted face of a light-skinned print model as reflected in a building’s polished facade, compliant consumers ascending escalators within the mirrored architecture of a multistorey shopping mall – tracing the remnants of the British colonial imprint on the city’s cultural and economic landscape.

The fate of oysters has long been viewed as a syndrome and symbol of short-sighted profit-seeking, as chronicled by Joseph Mitchell, a giant of mid-twentieth-century American journalism. Similar to Hong Kong’s once-thriving oyster trade, New York Harbor’s abundant shellfish beds were nearly decimated by centuries of over-harvesting and industrial pollution. In his 1951 

article ‘The Bottom of the Harbor’, Mitchell traces the decline of one of the world’s richest oyster habitats, focusing his lens on the simultaneous disbanding of the communities of Italian American and other working-class immigrants who once laboured at the city’s waterfronts. Mika Rottenberg’s 2015 film 

 examines the global commercial oyster harvesting industry more than half a century later. After visiting a pearl factory in Zhuji, China, Rottenberg centred her work on the extractive nature of cultured pearl production, whereby the bodies of oysters and their human labourers – in this case, the stooped backs of the hundreds of Chinese female factory workers who sit crouched over their stations, sifting through pearls, and the grotesque growth of their white overseer’s nose – are physically deformed in the cultivation process. Rottenberg’s absurd and violent allegory of the global supply chain makes clear that no one is spared in the capitalist economy.

(2005) visualizes the next turn of the screw in our species’ recent experiments in environmental exploitation. Like Fan, Hsu is known primarily for his premonitory painting and sculptural practice that for decades anticipated the transformation of the human body in the digital age. 

, his first entry into time-based media, begins and ends with the sickening glug of oil being poured onto itself, harking back to Mitchell’s description of New York City’s polluted harbour as a sludge of ‘black, bubbly water’.

Throughout Hsu’s nearly twenty-minute video, we hear the laboured breathing of a person connected to a ventilator, ocean waves colliding with the electrical hum of a defibrillator, and animalistic growls interwoven with the blaring sounds of hospital alarms. A hodgepodge of human and nonhuman animal noises – clucking chickens and mammalian brays, snarls, sighs and grunts – against the rhythmic backdrop of pressurized hissing and mechanical clicks, collapses the divide between the living organisms and automated systems. The visual field similarly becomes scrambled,as holographic fish, kaleidoscopic amphibians, and indistinguishable body parts – a belly button, folds of flesh – merge with abstracted shapes and patterns,making it difficult to separate animate from inanimate matter.

Made five years before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill – the largest oil disaster in recorded history, which released more than four million barrels of petroleum into the waters off the coast of Louisiana – Hsu’s video chillingly foreshadows the catastrophic impact of human industry and greed on Earth’s ecosystems. In addition to causing one of the largest wildlife mortality events in the Gulf of Mexico, including the billions of oysters that once inhabited its widespread reefs, the oil spill’s long-term effects continue to impact the region’s marine ecology. Aerial shots of the oil slicks at the time showed bright orange sheets fanned out across the ocean’s surface with iridescent streaks that reflected the sun’s rays – a sheen reminiscent of the lustrous interiors of Fan’s oyster shells. While Fan’s 

 uses oysters as both metaphors and material evidence of bodies susceptible to capitalist inscription, Hsu’s 

 suggests that humans and animals have already fused with industrial landscapes, rendering us inseparable from the toxic environments we inhabit. In 2023, Japan started to release contaminated wastewater from its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, while in the United States several chemical manufacturing firms have been found to have continued production of so-called ‘forever chemicals’ despite their toxicity.

 In recent years, scientists have confirmed the existence of microplastics in human lungs, placenta, breast milk and blood, as well as in the soft tissue of nearly every oyster.

Towards the end of Hsu’s video, an elderly man groans. A baby babbles. Perhaps the life cycle carries on. Oysters, long exploited for their meat and pearls, have in more recent years been viewed as part of environmental restoration efforts given the critical role they play in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems. A single oyster can filter almost 200 litres of water a day, purifying the ocean’s water and providing habitats that support coastal biodiversity. ‘C is for Change. C is for You,’ Fan’s video concludes, suggesting that even within cycles of capitalist destruction, there remains the possibility of human agency and renewal. But nothing is assured. Warming and acidifying oceans have led to mass oyster die-offs. The fate of oysters and humans is intertwined.

Biographies 

Soft Tissue: Jes Fan’s Palimpsest and Tishan Hsu’s Folds of Oil 

Folds of Oil 

Palimpsest

Soft Tissue: Jes Fan’s 'Palimpsest' and Tishan Hsu’s 'Folds of Oil'

 (Come to Me, Paradise; 2016), time is treated preciously. We follow the lives – partly fictionalized – of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. We are guided by a spirit narrator, Paraiso, who is all-seeing and mystical. Comilang deftly mixes freshly shot footage with more intimate modes of film: vlogs and mobile phone videos made by the women stars of her picture. Labour is the film’s subject, but its conditions are portrayed through other means: we are made privy, instead, to a time that is saturated with intimacy, celebration and friendship.

Skye Arundhati Thomas:
At the very start of 

, we’re thrown into a mysterious place – a bounty of tumbling hills and lush greenery – and we hear the voice of a narrator, the titular Paraiso. You build the story slowly from there; we travel to a city and then into a single room, where someone is getting ready for her day. And then you take us to a large square filled with women inside makeshift structures; we still don’t quite know what’s happening – until it’s revealed that the women are domestic workers, and this is how they spend their Sundays.

Stephanie Comilang:


 is a film about labour, but you never see anyone working. That was important to me; it was one of my first big projects, and I had been thinking about how to approach this subject for a while. I knew I wanted to make work specific to Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. I remember reading a quote from someone who hadn’t been to Hong Kong before: out on the streets on a Sunday, they weren’t sure if they were seeing a festival or a large gathering of unhoused people. And there was something so uncomfortable and complex about that description. It wasn’t until I went there on a research trip that I realized how incredible those Sunday scenes were.

All you see is women. There are barely any men around. You see cardboard and strung-up fabric; they’ve built semi-private rooms in public spaces. The first time I saw them, I asked: why? I had many whys: why are so many people here? Why are they using this space? Why aren’t they inside or at home on their holiday? It all comes down to the lack of space in Hong Kong. Domestic workers have to, by law, live with their employers. This means they have no private space, and the only way they can access private space is to go into public space and create private space for themselves. They use the architecture of central Hong Kong, the raised walkways and staircases, and they make small rooms to hang out in, to eat, chat, and call their families and kids.

SAT:
In one scene, we see a woman in a shimmery red dress, she’s on a microphone, and everyone’s cheering in the square; there’s indeed a festive mood in the air. But of course, this is tinged with the darkness of what it means for them to have so little time for themselves, for joy.

SC:
The women in Hong Kong have built their own world, which is full of many different characters. There are the butch tomboys from Mindanao, for instance, and the beauty queens; some of the women are second- or third-generation workers abroad. They also have their own economy, where they do manicures, pedicures, makeup, haircuts, or sell food. The way the city is built, and its lack of space, forces them to create what is actually a very special ecosystem.

But it’s a very hard life there. During my first research trip, there was a case in the courts of an Indonesian domestic worker who was almost killed while at work. When her boss dropped her off at the airport, she had lost half her body weight, and they found strange marks on her. Protests and demonstrations were happening often. But I didn’t want to show that. I was interested in how the women meet on Sundays, and how they spend their free time. I wanted to make a film about their moments of community, intimacy and pleasure.

SAT:
You often have an all-seeing narrator that guides us through your films. In 

, the narrator seems ancient, a ghostly figure between worlds who hovers over landscape and people; her perspective is that of a drone. She – Paraiso – uses an ‘I’ pronoun, but it often feels more like a ‘we’. She speaks in the manner of a chorus, in the ancient Greek sense: someone whose voice is also that of a larger community.

SC:
Paraiso is meant to be from the place with the hills, the one you see in the film’s opening sequence. That’s a real place in the Philippines called Bohol. The hills are old limestone covered in grass, and in the summer months they turn brown because of the lack of rain. They’re called the Chocolate Hills. I find the landscape so otherworldly and startling. And so I created a narrative where all the women are from this place, and they used to live under the hills once, and Paraiso is from there, too, just like them.

For me, Paraiso is one and the same as all the women in the film, and maybe she even says that. It’s just that her job is different from that of the other women. Her job is to transfer messages; she’s a conduit. She carries their messages back home.

I always begin a work by talking to people. On my first research trip to Hong Kong, I visited Bethune House, a shelter for foreign women who have nowhere to go if they lose their jobs. In Hong Kong, there’s something called the ‘two-week rule’, where, if you get fired, you have only two weeks to find a new job, or you face deportation. I also spoke to journalists. And, of course, I spoke to the women, the workers. While listening to those interviews and working on the script, this character – Paraiso – began to emerge in my mind. She is timeless because she is from many different eras and has many different perspectives. She’s an amalgamation of all the voices I heard while working on the project, including my own.

SAT:
Paraiso and the origin story of the Chocolate Hills add a fictional layer to what is a very real story. It infuses the film with magic and whimsy. This feels meaningful; it’s how you’ve made work about labour without resorting to representational tropes.

SC:
I wanted to create something multilayered that didn’t adhere to the traditional norms of documentary. I wanted to talk about real people in atypical situations and, importantly, about how they spend their pleasure time. Introducing fiction is a way to sidestep the problematics of documentary. I think documentary as form is a difficult one. It proposes a ‘truth’, which, for me, doesn’t exist because multiple truths exist simultaneously. You often have to get the speaker to say what you want them to say, which is absurd – you might as well make fiction! And so I like layering the two. It also becomes so much easier when I have this third voice materialize, the voice and approach of a character, and it’s easier to write from their perspective. In this one voice of Paraiso, I imagine multiple voices speaking on top of each other, and in these voices, there’s my experience as well as those of the people I talk to.


SAT:
In the near-magical world of your film, everyday moments and objects are imbued with special powers. In one scene, the women line up in a square, the sun is setting and the sky is an aqua blue. They’re on their phones, which appear like talismans.

SC:
The phone is a spiritual object in the film. The women hold it up in front of them, and they’re meditating. You can’t hear them, but they are saying: ‘Come to me, Paradise’. On Sundays, the women have their phones in front of them all the time because they’re either talking to each other or to their kids and family. In the film, the phone is also how they call Paraiso, who sends their messages back home. In the scene you describe, Paraiso and the women are talking to each other. They’re holding their phones out, and Paraiso is downloading what they show her. They’re standing in a line, which is a fictional moment in the film, and this was my reference to how Filipino women have to queue up on Sundays in order to send their remittances.

SAT:
All representation is arguably an act of fiction-making. While you, as the filmmaker, don’t necessarily have a documentary approach, the women in your film sometimes do: they film themselves in their rooms or while asking each other questions.

SC:
How someone wants to represent themselves is important to me. Some of the footage is from the women’s phones – it’s clips they sent me, of filming themselves brushing their teeth or applying makeup. It’s footage of small moments. And it’s theirs. Then there are excerpts from vlogs, many of which are from the YouTube channel of one of the women in the film, Irish May Salinas. When I had first searched for Filipino domestic workers’ vlogs, hers had come up. She had makeup tutorials, cooking tutorials and also financial advice. She’d studied journalism and done a series of guerrilla-style interviews with other working women. I include some in the film; she holds the camera so close to her interviewees. This kind of vlogging style is personal and opposite to the drone character, Paraiso, who is positioned slightly higher and not so proximate. Her angles are different, even though she communicates with the women too.

SAT:
In the film, the vlogs undergo a transformation, and as viewers, we are so lucky to see them and glean their insights. The vlogs become pieces of history; in a sense, they are evidence and an archive of a certain kind of life. Sometimes, this is a life that is being pushed to the margins but refuses its own erasure.

SC:
I really like how personal the vlogs are. It’s a form of storytelling I really enjoy. There’s this dad, for instance, whose videos I watch sometimes. He’s a worker in the Philippines and a single dad taking care of three kids. He puts his phone on his bike and just rides around. It’s so nice. This way of relating to people is compelling to me. It’s similar to reading a book, where you go so deeply into a character that it’s almost like you’re in their head. I appreciate that intimacy.

I’m also interested in how people create space for themselves, especially when they are no longer in the place where they were born. Right now, for instance, I’m obsessed with watching vlogs by Filipinos who live in Japan. They’re factory workers, and they work crazy hours. Their videos are usually about their day, or how much money they spend on groceries, and also about what it’s like when they meet each other socially. It’s a simple formula, but I find the videos soothing, which is also why I watch them. Vlogs are an excellent resource and tool and can also be monetized: they become an added income for those who make them.

SAT:
What’s very moving – and feels like a theme that runs through your work – is how you show migration, travel and even displacement as integral to notions of home. You often blur the binary distinction between home and abroad. It’s almost like you say: home is also when you have to leave.

SC:
In my work, the idea of home is interchangeable, and it’s something I’m always playing around with. I’m curious about what ‘home’ really means and how people express it or have to find it in different places. This is a very common story in the Philippines: a mother has to go to work abroad, but her children are still at home, so they never see their mother. When the mother comes home, it’s time for the children to go abroad to find work. A person in my film 

 (2024) says it so well when describing his relationship with his mother, a domestic worker: ‘Like ships’, he says, ‘passing in the night’.

Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

 (2022), the artist appropriates the close-up of Diana Ross performing the three-minute song of the same name from Sidney Lumet’s film 

 (1978). By obscuring Ross’s face with the insistent glare of a handheld spotlight and by silencing her voice, the emotional intensity of the performance is paradoxically heightened. Disguising Ross as the source of the song, the light accentuates those physical gestures that extend beyond the sphere of the beam: her shoulders and chest flex with effort, and the crown of her head rises from the pool of light during the song’s unheard crescendo. Rather than diminishing the emotion of the performance, Gale’s rejection of the cinematic close-up through its erasure works to defamiliarize it and disrupts a straightforward identification of the ‘representational economies’ of its Black subject in the projection of psychic pain. 

In refusing the coupling of audible voice and visible source, 

 also challenges the famous narrative denouement of L. Frank Baum’s novel 

 (1900). In that scene, the unlocatable, acousmatic voice of the Wizard – initially terrifyingly mysterious – is stripped of its mystical power by the classic curtain drop that reveals a frantic old man and, in so doing, binds an ordinary human image to the previously unknowable sound. Simultaneously rejecting what Michel Chion describes as the ‘dis-acousmatic’ gesture of a final reveal, Gale’s partial acousmatic transformation of Ross reveals her as the real source of power.

 This physical act of overexposure therefore serves as an alternate cinematic method of sorts: through projecting light onto the original footage, Gale alters the focus and meaning of what is contained within the frame.

Like Gale’s handheld spotlight, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 

Nicole Wong

Exhibitions

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