Time: 10:10–18:00, Moving Image Centre Lounge

Phantom Banquet

2022 | VR 360 stereoscopic video | Colour | Sound | 9 min. 51 sec.

Commissioned by Performa, New York, this group VR experience explores cultural belonging within the Cantonese diaspora in Sweden, drawing on memories of the artist’s family restaurant in Stockholm. Using 3D laser scans, the work navigates a third space—familiar yet not situated anywhere specific—to create a shared cultural afterimage resonating across geographies from Asia to Europe. The narrative follows a teenage girl who disappears through a mirror into alternate dimensions, encountering ghostly figures in a surreal landscape of abandoned Chinese restaurants. As VR users gather around a communal dining table—the type seen in Chinese restaurants across the globe—they are invited to reflect on their own cultural identities, histories, and places of belonging.

Lap-See Lam (b. 1990, Sweden) engages with a diverse array of artistic genres and practices, including video installations, VR, AR, sculpture, and live performances. Her work weaves traditional Chinese storytelling elements, such as shadow play and Cantonese opera, with contemporary digital technologies to explore themes of displacement, identity, and the complexities of Chinese cultural heritage in a global context. In 2024, Lam represented Sweden at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Time: 11:00–12:30, House 1

Screening Credits

The Tree House

2019 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 84 min

Set in 2045, a Vietnamese migrant living on Mars grapples with the concept of home while communicating with his father in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Reflecting on the Indigenous Ruc and Kor people, whose cave homes and tree houses were ravaged during the Vietnam War, the film serves as a meditation on displacement and how spaces hold deep ancestral memories. Using an associative montage technique that intertwines contemporary 16mm documentary footage with archival military films, it considers the weight of memory and the enduring impact of dislocation. At the same time, it reflexively interrogates the ethics of documentary practice: does the filmmaker have the right to put these people in front of his camera and narrate their stories? Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understandings of home.

Time: 12:30–12:50, House 1

Screening Credits

Mother's Tongue

2018 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 17 min. 42 sec.

This speculative video is the first in a trilogy of works that explore the aesthetics of Chinese restaurants in Lap-See Lam’s native Sweden. Made in collaboration with filmmaker Wingyee Wu, it unfolds across three chapters—past (1978), present (2018), and future (2058)—and is voiced by three generations of women. Using 3D laser scans, the video preserves the interiors of these restaurants, which are deeply tied to Lam’s own personal history—her family owned and operated the Bamboo Garden in Stockholm for over thirty years.

Mother’s Tongue navigates generational shifts within the context of diasporic identity, revealing how these restaurants serve as both cultural touchstones and sites of displacement. Through ghostly, glitchy visuals and fictive monologues, the video explores how proximity to Chinese culture is shaped by these spaces of resilience, cultural hegemony, and shapeshifting identities.

Time: 12:50–13:30, House 1

Following screenings of The Tree House (2019) and Mother’s Tongue (2018), artists Trương Minh Quý and Lap-See Lam engage in a dialogue about displacement, ancestral memories, and cultural representation within their specific global contexts—Lam through her Cantonese diaspora experience and Quý through his Vietnamese heritage. The conversation will explore how the artists intertwine personal and collective histories, documentary and fictional filmmaking, and historical and speculative narratives, to surface ideas of home and belonging. They will also discuss the challenges and nuances of making work about ‘here’ from afar, reflecting on how distance shapes their narratives and artistic practices.

The conversation will be moderated by Ulanda Blair, Curator of Moving Image at M+. It will take place in English.

Time: 14:30–15:30, House 1

Noh Suntag’s photographic practice explores the act of seeing from afar in the context of Korea’s division. His series Divided Dizziness (2017, 2023) features rare photographs of North Korea’s tightly controlled northern borders, captured from China and Russia. The blurred yet sublime images, resulting from the challenging conditions under which they were taken, serve as a metaphor for the fragile and shaky division of the country. In A Mirror Reflecting Each Other (2005, 2017), he juxtaposes architectural symbols of power in Korea’s northern and southern capitals, revealing uncanny parallels in their ideological discourses.

In this special live presentation, Noh will share a selection of photographs from both photographic series, accompanied by music and interspersed with his own stories about their making and meaning. His artistic show-and-tell will provide insights into the Korean psyche since its physical division after World War II, from a deeply personal perspective.

Time: 16:00–17:15, House 1

Screening Credits

The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images

2018 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 66 min.

In the 1970s, a group of left-wing Japanese militants committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause settled in Lebanon, where they lived underground for decades. Among them was the radical filmmaker Masao Adachi. Known as a theorist of fûkeiron, Adachi was part of a movement of filmmakers who shot landscapes to reveal the omnipresent structures of power that underpin social and political systems. However, all the films he made during his self-imposed exile were destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War. A decade after Adachi’s arrest and extradition to Japan, Eric Baudelaire travelled to Lebanon and filmed places where Adachi lived with other members of the left-wing Japanese Red Army. Baudelaire records the experiences of militant leader Fusako Shigenobu and her daughter May, who was born in Lebanon and only travelled to Japan after her mother’s arrest in 2000.

Time: 17:15–18:00, House 1

In this conversation, artists Noh Suntag and Eric Beaudelaire discuss their artistic approaches to addressing complex socio-political historical and contemporary issues. They share how overcoming concrete physical obstacles and restricted access to knowledge, situations, and people can serve as a catalyst for artistic creation. As research-based artists, they use lens-based media and text to depict rarely seen places and situations, providing important insights into lesser-known histories and their repercussions in the present.

The conversation will be moderated by Chanel Kong, Curator of Moving Image at M+. It will take place in Korean and English.