This is an installation from 2012 by Hong Kong artist Ho Sin Tung. In the installation, thirty-five separate pieces, including imaginary films, paintings of imagined film stills, movie posters, and video trailers, come together to create a fictional film festival called Hong Kong Inter-Vivos Film Festival.

Ho has put the festival together as a director would, selecting works, making posters, putting together brochures, and arranging venues and seating, with the purpose of both paying homage to and satirising the film industry, as well as to fulfil her own desire to make films.

The films she has created for the festival exist only through posters, film stills, trailers, and plot descriptions. They are all based on a mishmash of references to actual films, directors, and genres. In this way, Ho pays homage to classic filmmakers, but also plays with the assumed authority of 'the classics' and film festival discourse.

The title of Ho’s imaginary film Caesar Must Live, for example, is similar to that of the 2012 film Caesar Must Die. The story, however, is completely different—Ho’s film plot follows the actual Julius Caesar as he falls into a time tunnel, arrives in a new millennium, and learns how to make a Caesar salad from a handsome chef. As the artist describes it, ‘Caesar has never been this cute.’

The imaginary film Conspirators of Displeasure, on the other hand, is made out to be a rare find, with the artist describing how the film festival management crew flew to Prague and persuaded the city’s film archive to lend out their only version. It is part of the 'Fish Man' series—‘the longest Czech animation series ever made’, according to Ho—by fictional Czech director Frantnwl Husák, about a fish-man’s family life.

Ho has also created imaginary seating charts for the festival. Spaced, for example, depicts a seating map of the auditorium in the Hong Kong Space Museum. The artist researched a variety of cinema spaces in Hong Kong to create the seating maps, making them look like old-fashioned theatre layouts to contrast with contemporary styles of cinema seating, which feel more mass-produced and less glamorous.

The central piece of the installation is Black Eyed Dog. This piece is the only one that brings the cinema-going experience into the viewer’s own space, using an actual cinema chair. The combination of the chair and the illustrations on the wall is intended to encapsulate the experience of being inside a cinema.

Ho Sin Tung is a young Hong Kong artist who graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008. She usually works with pencil, graphite, watercolour, and, occasionally, with stickers and rubber stamps, in combination with her own intensely personal experiences with found images. Her work has a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, reinterpreting urban life through researching and participating in it. She’s also a very prolific artist and has exhibited extensively both in Hong Kong and overseas.

Moving image is a very important part of Hong Kong visual culture, reflected in the popularity and endurance of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, a major cultural event held every year. Since Ho Sin Tung is a huge movie fan and a regular attendee at the HKIFF, her work has very interesting associations with this festival, and she’s using an alternative approach to participate in the film festival tradition through artistic expression.

Through this work, we also want to show the audience how the two traditional fields of visual art and moving image—two core disciplines in the M+ Collection—can connect and overlap.