May Fung has been an influential voice in Hong Kong experimental moving-image practice for nearly five decades. M+ has recently acquired and restored seven films by Fung that will screen throughout the festival. This new acquisition includes her earliest Super 8 mm films made in the 1970s, her experimental video art shot on VHS in the 1980s, and her digital video portraits created in the 1990s and early 2000s. These works form part of M+’s newest collection initiative, the Asian Avant-Garde Film Circulation Library, dedicated to preserving and promoting Asian experimental film and video art from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Following a screening of selected Hong Kong films and videos recently added to the Asian Avant-Garde Film Circulation Library, Fung will join fellow filmmakers Law Kar and Sek Kei for a lively panel discussion about the ongoing legacy of Hong Kong’s early film and video art scenes. This talk will be conducted in Cantonese with Simultaneous Interpretation in English.

In Ho Tzu Nyen and Wong Hin-yan’s brand new live-cinema commission Timepieces (2025), the artists present a multi-sensorial experience of time in which Ho’s 43-channel installation is staged on a single monumental screen. The visuals are synchronised to Wong’s original live score combining music, spoken word, and haiku poetry in English and Cantonese. Created especially for the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025, this unique collaboration alludes to multiple, fluid, and elusive depictions of time, inviting us to contemplate our own experiences of temporality.

Tehching Hsieh is renowned for a series of works that revolutionised the conceptual, physical, aesthetic, and temporal limits of performance art. His body of work includes six performances, which the artist defines as his ‘lifeworks’. For the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025, Hsieh will participate in three moderated discussions, at the same time each day. Each illustrated talk will focus on two of his ‘lifeworks’ which include One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece); One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece); One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece); Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece); One Year Performance 1985–1986 (No Art Piece); and Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan).

Museum visitors should also not miss Hsieh’s poetic artist statement, presented in the Festival Lounge beside the M+ Grand Stair. Reflecting on human existence, creativity, and the passage of time, Hsieh’s text blurs the lines between art and everyday life.

Amar Kanwar has distinguished himself through films and multi-media works which explore the politics of power, violence, and justice. His film Such a Morning (2017) is a parable about two people’s quiet engagement with truth. Searching for a way to re-comprehend the difficult times we are living in, Kanwar asks ‘What is it that lies beyond, when all arguments are done with? How to reconfigure and respond again?’ Such a Morning unlocks a metaphysical response to our contemporary reality as it navigates multiple hallucinations between speech and silence, fear and freedom, and democracy and fascism.

In a separate event, the artist will speak on his artistic practice and enduring interest in time. Accompanied by images and elements from his work, Kanwar will discuss his video and installation work, and projects such as The Torn First Pages (2004–2008), a work which offers both a direct and an elliptical encounter with democracy, violence, exile, and memory.

Commissioned for the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025, Ali Wong Kit Yi’s Timebombs! is a karaoke performance lecture that investigates multilayered interpretations of time from Western and Eastern philosophical and theological perspectives. The artist questions how our temporal existence is confined by our bodily condition that informs our choices and response to various global urgencies—from climate change to the fertility crisis and beyond. Through a personal and feminist lens, Wong ponders whether women experience a unique relationship with time, and if liberation from these imposed timelines is possible. 

Festival visitors can also look forward to intimate encounters with the artist through her performative activation One Hour Contract. Drawing from her teaching experience at an art school in New York, Wong invites all audiences to join her for a private and personalised one-on-one session. One Hour Contract offers a safe space for creative exchange, allowing for diverse activities such as portfolio reviews, musings on video art, shared silence, or simply spending time together.

Chikako Yamashiro treats the human body’s inarticulate expressions—its utterances and pulses—as windows into repressed traumas, hidden histories, and other unseen dimensions of time. Utterance, Pulse brings together three films from different stages of Yamashiro’s career. They illuminate analogous experiences across different historical and geographical contexts, from a Japanese veteran’s recollections of the battle of Saipan in Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009); to the excavation of half-buried colonial histories shared between Okinawa and Jeju Island in Mud Man (2016); to an elderly Okinawan man’s inherited imaginations of Belau in Flowers of Belau (2023).