Unlike other parts of the world, the history of early moving image art in Asia remains relatively little known. M+ is now working to address this critical gap through curatorial research, restoration, and international circulation as part of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Collection (AAGFC), supported by CHANEL. Dedicated to preserving and promoting Asian experimental film and video art, the AAGFC focuses on single-channel artist films and videos from the 1960s to the 1990s. The collection safeguards vital yet underrepresented works from the region’s moving image history and activates them as an important resource for artists, researchers, curators, and audiences worldwide.

This selection of works from the AAGFC offers a glimpse of the breadth of films and videos from across Asia responding to issues that shaped the region, from decolonisation, nation-building, the Cold War, and ecological change to feminism, migration, and urbanisation. This compilation provides curatorial guideposts for various types of touring programmes, repositioning Asian experimental film and video art within a broader global narrative of moving image history.

Three films in this compilation are part of the touring programme Private Revolutions, Public Spaces, in which artists Han Okhi, Chen Chieh-jen, and Nick Deocampo use the city as their site of intervention to capture and resist the politics of their time and place. Other works include intimate, diaristic films by Asian women artists such as Mary Stephen and May Fung, who offer a feminist poetics of the self while charting the transformations in their environments. Finally, films by Gotot Prakosa, Jim Shum, and Ruby Yang showcase the astounding variety of abstract films across Asia, foregrounding rhythm, texture, colour, and materiality to create immersive sensorial worlds.

Screenings run in a loop.