Time: 11:00–12:00, Moving Image Centre Lounge

A blend of mechanical engineering, audio synthesis, and performance installation, Samuel Swope’s Aeolian Rider (2025) invites viewers to engage with turbulent movement, sound, and space. This iteration will feature professional vocalists hidden behind an array of industrial fans. Swope remotely controls the rate of the fans as the vocalists sing and scream into the spinning blades and blowing winds. Real-time data captured from the industrial fans is digitally synthesised and amplified into an accompaniment to the vocalists. As the soundwaves vibrate and penetrate surrounding spaces, they highlight invisible physical structures and reveal digital pathways.

Time: 12:00–13:30, House 1

YoungEun Kim’s work explores the hidden power and politics of sound and listening. For Kim, listening is more than a mere sensory experience; it is a critical practice essential to uncovering the interplay between history and power. By examining the history of sound, Kim highlights how sounds reflect society’s shifting values and can gain or lose social and cultural meaning over time. The three works selected for screening at M+ probe how sonic and acoustic cultures have been transformed by the violence of colonialism.

Screening credits

Listening Guests

2025 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 38 min.

Listening Guests focuses on the aural experiences of the Koryoin community in Korea (ethnic Koreans from the former Soviet Union) and the Korean immigrant community in Los Angeles. Examining how the listening practices of these communities are shaped through processes of relocation and adjustment, the film explores the power and potential of sound and listening in forming migrant experiences of language acquisition, musical production and consumption, and everyday aural events.

To Future Listeners III

2025 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 12 min. 25 sec.

The song featured in this film is an Irish immigrant tune recorded in the United States during the early twentieth century, originally sung by a man. Kim digitally transforms this recording into a choral arrangement sung by women—voices that were never formally recorded—as a way of literally amplifying the voices of immigrant domestic workers who existed in the space between history and oblivion.

Brilliant A

2022 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 16 min. 56 sec.

Brilliant A reconstructs the moment when the first piano arrived in South Korea, brought by an American missionary in the early twentieth century. This piano was instrumental in introducing the A pitch, the standard 440 Hz tuning frequency for most modern instruments. Kim’s film explores how this introduction transformed Koreans’ understanding of sound, shifting their tastes from traditional to Western musical styles.

Time: 14:45–15:45, House 1

In 2021, He Zike co-initiated the interdisciplinary project Under the Cloud, which invited researchers, artists and curators to investigate the geological landscape and technological infrastructure of Southwest China. Two video works stemming from the project invite viewers to explore the representation and politics of tunnels, caves, and invisible digital infrastructures.

The conversation will be conducted in Putonghua, with consecutive interpretation in English.

Screening Credits

Random Access

He Zike | 2023 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 16 min. 06 sec.

Random Access (2023) blends science fiction with the karst terrain and urban landscape of Guiyang, home to one of China’s national data centre clusters. The story begins after the data centre suddenly crashes, leaving the two protagonists, a taxi driver and her passenger, to navigate the city’s labyrinth of highways and tunnels without data or GPS. The pair’s conversation touches on the hidden spaces in urban architecture and the natural landscape, employing clever puns that bridge the physical and virtual realms and exploring themes such as memory, storage, and the cloud. As the protagonists attempt to find their way through the urban maze, viewers are prompted to contemplate their own paths in an increasingly technological future.

THE CON(TRA)CAVE #1: On the Subsumption of Voidness, or a Phantasy of Autopoiesis 

Du Ruo and Zhang Wenxin | 2025 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 23 min. 38 sec.

The Con(tra)cave is a long-term artistic research project that examines the asymmetric relationship between representation and what is represented. Inspired by spaces historically marked as 'sunken fields' and geologically characterised as caves and concavities in the karst landscape of Southwest China, the work investigates the representational construction of these spaces as zones of lack. It invites engagement with the uncanny and obscure, encouraging the unlearning of established notions through ghostly materials and liminal spaces in the everyday. It acts as a device of unworlding: a poetic call to linger in the interstices of meaning and value, resisting universal interpretations and embracing the complexity of existence.

Time: 16:15–17:05, House 1

Lee Kai Chung explores the gaps in archives and official histories through his research-driven practice, focusing on the remnants of power and colonial influence in East Asia. In 2017, he began a series of ongoing projects with the theme of displacement. These projects examine human migration and the movement of materials within the context of colonial power. They investigate the concept of displacement, broadening its definition to include emotional, historical, generational, and geopolitical aspects of human experiences in Eurasia.

Screening credits

As Below, So Above

2023 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 32 min. 27 sec.

Towards the end of WWII, a Japanese rearguard soldier and a Shin Buddhist militant take refuge in Hailar Fortress, a twenty-one-kilometre-square underground complex near the North-east China-Soviet Union border. The hidden stronghold remains unnoticed by those above ground, leaving the two men isolated below. To cope, they discuss Buddhist scriptures and speculate on the fate of the Soviet Red Army. The oppressive darkness and silence of the fortress breed a pervasive fear, however. When the prospect of freedom finally comes, it brings disorientation rather than relief, leaving them trapped in a cycle of despair.

Time: 17:05–18:00, House 1

This roundtable brings together He Zike, YoungEun Kim, Lee Kai Chung, and Samuel Swope, the four artists participating in Avant-Garde Now: Hidden Spaces. The discussion will explore the connections and divergences in their practices and cultural contexts, while unpacking the latent and repressed histories, politics, and psychological dimensions revealed through their art.

This talk will be moderated by Ulanda Blair, Curator, Moving Image, and Kate Gu, Associate Curator, Digital Special Projects. The talk will be held in English and Putonghua, with consecutive interpretation in English.