Avant-Garde Now:
Wayfinding 前衛正！尋幽探祕
Ticket Information
Standard: HKD 120
Concessions: HKD 96
Tickets open to public starting 27 Mar.
Avant-Garde Now:
Wayfinding 前衛正！尋幽探祕
How do you find your way, and what does that say about where you are? ‘Avant-Garde Now: Wayfinding’ is the latest in our series of one-day events of screenings, performances, and conversations presenting fresh perspectives in contemporary moving image practices. Following previous events ‘Here from Afar’ and ‘Hidden Spaces’, ‘Wayfinding’ continues a year-long exploration of space as we move towards a thematic culmination in the forthcoming Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival: Space Enter Shift (29–31 May 2026). Invited artists and collectives, such as AFSAR, HeeSue Kwon, Li San Kit, and Tulapop Saenjaroen, offer perspectives on the spaces that are brought to the forefront in the process of finding a path, in the act of returning, and the effort of defining where to go. Whether shot on celluloid or transformed in real time, these works measure, describe, and perform the real and fictive ways in which we find our bearings, understand where we’ve been, and imbue places with specific meaning.
Schedule
11:00–12:30: Bearings: Local Sensations & Old Slab | Screening with introductions by Tulapop Saenjaroen and Li San Kit (House 1)
12:30–13:40: Lunch break
13:45–15:10: Returns: Lucky 7 & Mangosteen | Screening and in-person conversation with Li San Kit and Tulapop Saenjaroen (House 1)
15:30–16:55: Directions: Melting Fire Iceman | Projection Performance and process demonstration by HeeSue Kwon (House 1)
17:00–17:45: Approaches: Cosmotechnical Filmmaking | A Collective Conversation with Sun Park of AFSAR (Moving Image Centre Lounge)
17:45–18:30: AAGFF 2026 Preview: Space Enter Shift (Moving Image Centre Lounge)
Time: 11:00–12:30, House 1
This programme provides the first guidance on finding our bearings through the works of two moving image artists, Tulapop Saenjaroen and Li San Kit.
Screening credits
Local Sensations
2025 | 16 mm transferred to 2K Digital | B&W | Sound | 25min.
Shot on black-and-white 16 mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay ‘How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine’. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities—unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject—and gestures towards a kind of topological politics.
While Saenjaroen’s work explores ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation centre with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.
These fragments, only obliquely connected, are woven into an evolving, gently destabilising field of sensation. Together, they form an ecological and metaphysical nexus—an invitation to reconsider what ‘locality’ and ‘monumentality’ might mean, and how close they are to us.
Old Slab
2025 | 16 mm transferred to 4K Digital | Colour | Sound | 43 min.
Old Slab proposes an alternative approach to document space. The film chronicles a dwelling of thirty years in Fu Shan Estate, a public housing estate in Hong Kong. The residential block adopts the style of ‘Old Slab’, where the building is an elongated rectangular structure with thirty-four flats internally connected by a single corridor.
Shot on 16 mm film, the seven chapters of the work unfold under a spatial-driven mode of documentation to capture building structures, environmental changes, and a family's process of vacating their home. The camera drifts from the communal spaces of the estate into the confines of a flat, occasionally shifting its standing afar in search of home. Beyond a visual record of urban housing and an artist’s domestic space, Li’s work is a distinctively personal remembrance of how a home had become a defining frame of a family's history.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Local Sensations, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Local Sensations, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Local Sensations, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Old Slab, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Old Slab, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Old Slab, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Local Sensations, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Local Sensations, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Local Sensations, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Old Slab, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Old Slab, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Old Slab, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Time: 13:45–15:10, House 1
This programme once again pairs artists Li San Kit and Tulapop Saenjaroen in a dialogue about the essence of returns, and what it means about where we have been.
Screening credits
Lucky 7
2016 | Super 8 film transferred to 2K Digital | Colour | Sound | 20 min.
As the first work Li San Kit shot on celluloid film, Lucky 7 commemorates the moment the artist decided to capture the fleeting essence of memory, featuring the recollections of seven people who had been important to his life at the age of twenty-one. The artist made the work in the middle of a two-year stay in Germany, recalling these individuals through the minutiae of their daily lives, such as their schedules and places of employment.
Just as he left Hong Kong for Germany without explanation, Li also returned without fanfare and made this work without seeking anyone’s permission. A work to celebrate unspoken understandings, excluded acknowledgments, forgotten anecdotes, as well as the art of muted relationships, Lucky 7 is a very personal work. It is a young artist’s attempt to reclaim his city and retrieve what’s remembered and forgotten, to memorialise the journey and properly define the relationships that had meant the most.
Mangosteen
2022 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 40 min.
Beginning at a mangosteen juice factory on the east coast of the gulf of Thailand, Mangosteen follows a brother and sister duo, Earth and Ink, as their interior worlds reach out to meet one another. Earth is a young man returning to his hometown to involve himself in the fruit juice business. Things take a different turn when he realises that his notion of the future is vastly different from his sister’s. He decides to resume his old writing hobby and attempts to produce a novel of existentially phantasmagorical and irrational proportions.
This offbeat, subtly humorous work explores the slippage of reality and imagination, and the possibility of fiction for bringing new forms into being. Lensed with the fuzzy-edged resolution and smeary vibrancy of early-2000s standard-definition video, Saenjaroen’s film blends family drama, process documentary, and narratological meditation to ultimately investigate the nature of returning, fabulation, and the transmutation of the material world.
Li San Kit. Lucky 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Lucky 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Lucky 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Mangosteen, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Mangosteen, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Mangosteen, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Lucky 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Lucky 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit. Lucky 7, 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Mangosteen, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Mangosteen, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Tulapop Saenjaroen. Mangosteen, 2022. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Time: 15:30–16:50, House 1
This programme reorients audiences in a sensorial experience to reflect on the nature of seeing and the components in image-making itself.
Screening credits
Melting Fire Iceman
2024 | Live cine-performance with multi-projectors, camera, shutter speed devices, MIDI controller | Colour | Sound | 60 min.
Artist HeeSue Kwon upturns the fundamental rules and expectations of the cinema experience and anticipations in spectatorship in Melting Fire Iceman, an expanded cinema performance in which a set of projectors are employed as extensions of the audience, resurfacing their collective memories while Kwon manipulates flickers and intervals in real time. Using a variety of modes and techniques, such as a reverse diffusion model, Kwon taps into images from early films and archival footage from the Internet Archive and reimagines them with AI to create fluid, transmogrifying visuals that seem to morph onto themselves. In this oneiric work, cinema seems to be dissolving, coming alive, and entering endless cycles of rebirth—a self-hypnotic ode to the ties that bind us to the cinema but also the permission to be released from them. Melting Fire Iceman offers a liminal space where locations, order, past, and future are blurred and rehoused within us, over and ever again.
The artist will briefly talk about her projection equipment following the performance.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Time: 17:00–17:45, Moving Image Centre Lounge
What does it mean to find your way into a cosmotechnical filmmaking practice through friendship, pilgrimage, and collective study? Structured in three movements—pilgrimage, companionship, and divination—Sun Park from the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) introduces the collective’s practice and guides a collective session with the Avant-Garde Now artists to look at filmmaking as a relational technology.
Created especially in response to the theme of wayfinding, Park’s talk will share ideas around how the notion of travel has been shaped by the modalities in which AFSAR engages its members, and the role of a research companion for a film project as an alternate guidepost for creative practice. She will invite artists and the public to participate in forms of reading and divination as a form of individual and collective self-governance. This session will help guide audiences to reflect on the theme of space as an overarching theme of investigation, which will be featured prominently at the 2026 Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival.
Time: 17:45–18:30, Moving Image Centre Lounge
‘Avant-Garde Now: Wayfinding’ makes way for the upcoming third edition of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival (AAGFF), taking place 29–31 May 2026. Curators of the upcoming festival will introduce the programming framework and new visual identity, speak about their favorite festival artists and event highlights, and discuss the shifting perspectives on Asian avant-garde.
A casual reception with a music selection by Gilles Vanderstocken follows this brief presentation.
About the Artists
Tulapop Saenjaroen (b. 1986, Chon Buri, Thailand) is an artist and filmmaker who works across mediums including moving image, performance, and sound. His recent short films probe the relationship between image production and the formation of subjectivity, as well as the paradoxical dynamics between control and freedom under late capitalism. In combining narrative, animation, and the essay film genre, he explores themes such as tourism, self-care, power relations, and cinema itself through a process of remaking and reinterpreting images and their networks. Saenjaroen’s works have been presented internationally at venues including Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, and the Museum of the Moving Image.
Portrait of Tulapop Saenjaroen. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Li San Kit (b. 1994, Hong Kong) is an experimental filmmaker and a photo-based artist. His practice introduces the machine into the periphery of the image, resurfacing a visible layer which documents the intent of image-making and reveals the applied rationale in its process. Imbuing the image-machine with agency, his photographed subjects are put in proximity with the documentation process. His work takes the form of 16mm film, photography, video, installation, and photo-objects.
Portrait of Li San Kit. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
HeeSue Kwon is a filmmaker and live performance artist whose practice explores the expansion of human viewpoint and the interplay between optical apparatuses and bodily perception, approached as a methodology for rearranging existing orders. Her films, video installations, and live performances have been widely presented in Korea and at international festivals, including Singapore International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Beijing’s Invisible Spectrum. In 2024, she was the recipient of the Korean EXiS Award at the Seoul International Experimental Film Festival.
Kwon’s work centres on the mechanism of emergence and operation of cinema and images. In her works, the liminal moments where hierarchical structures are destabilised and perception enters a mutated, heightened state are captured in transformative sensorial experiences. Working primarily with films and projectors, Kwon develops new forms of creation that fuse cinema, ambient sound, and live performance.
Portrait of HeeSue Kwon. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) addresses the urgent need for transnational discourse through reciprocal exchange between Asian and diasporic practitioners, generating an embodied archive from collective artistic research. Taking the form of film production, study groups, programming, and publications, AFSAR explores ‘Asia’ as a framework to approach issues impacting its localities and diaspora.
Sun Park (b. 1990, South Korea) is an artist and cultural worker exploring the remnants of ‘forced poetics’ within a neocolonial context, producing public programmes with moving image artists and collectives in London. With AFSAR, she studies cosmotechnics, Asian futurism, and feminist remembering with positive obsession, and facilitates a study group called ‘The Murmuring: in the key of Cha’. Currently, she is interested in gossip, friendship, and risk.
Portrait of Sun Park. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Image at top: HeeSue Kwon. Melting Fire Iceman, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
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