M+ Cinema's inaugural ‘Screen Encounters’ features the works of Hong Kong-based writer, poet, filmmaker and video artist Yau Ching. The artist interrogates the politics of representation, particularly in relation to questions of gender, exile, and cultural translation in this screening, presenting Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You About?, Flow, and The Ideal Na(rra)tion from the M+ Collection.

Chinese subtitles

M+, Hong Kong

Loosely structured as a video letter, Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You About? explores the relationship between historical memory, desire, migration, and gender construction. The images in this short film are excerpted from movies, travel shows, archival government footage, and historical photographs, and are accompanied by a monologue performed by Sikay Tang.

Chinese & English subtitles

M+, Hong Kong

Yau Ching further interrogated the notion of unstable identity in Flow. In it, Yau asks more open-ended questions, but this time to a real person called Hou Wenyi, a Chinese artist who was exiled to the United States after the Cultural Revolution and who lived next door to Yau in New York City. Through a highly reflexive approach, and in the form of personal documentary, the film’s narrative expresses moments of anxiety but also exhilaration, as the two Chinese female artists see in each other the possibilities and limitations of a self in another life.

Chinese & English subtitles

M+, Hong Kong

The Ideal Na(rra)tion is a pioneering example of Hong Kong independent music videos. The music is performed by Blackbird, a politically oriented underground rock band founded by Lenny Kwok Tat-lin in 1984. The video’s archival footage is artistically edited and used in an abstract and emotive way. It combines government propaganda and other found images and text to address how those materials were instrumentalised by the State to discipline people’s emotions and psyches.

Yau Ching (b. 1966, Hong Kong) is a writer, filmmaker, moving image artist, scholar, and educator. An important figure in pushing the development of moving image in Hong Kong, Yau was a member of Hong Kong—based new media art organisation Videotage at its founding stages. Over the past thirty years, Yau has created ten moving image works and four feature films, expressing her ongoing exploration of home, gender, and history.