What would you first notice if you woke up on a new planet? Could you breathe? Would you ever find your way home?
Science fiction has long served as a way of imagining possible futures, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the first fictional voyages to the moon. In Search of Other Worlds: The Cosmos and Beyond follows that same impulse through four works in the M+ Collections, each probing the relationship between the individual and the unknown. Adapted from an essay by Yan Wai Yin and directed by Nicola Fan, the film brings these works into dialogue through a shared sense of wonder.
Is there a life beyond the one we’re living? If so, what does it look like?
Arthur Hacker’s illustration of Hong Kong’s now-demolished Tiger Balm Gardens portrays a world of folklore and fantasy. It was here that visitors once walked through scenes of morality and the afterlife, rendered in sculpture and paint. Len Lye’s film Particles in Space (1979) takes a different approach; by scratching marks directly onto film, Lye turned specks of light and an accompanying percussion-based soundtrack into something akin to staring into deep space, while Hon Chi-fun’s Changing Orbit (1993) channels cosmic curiosity through expressive abstraction, with recurring circular forms suggesting orbits and perspectives in constant motion. Sony’s ‘AIBO’ entertainment robot (1999) shifts the question from outer space to inner life: what happens when machines are designed not to perform tasks but to form bonds?
Drawn together by Fan, these works shirk reject a singular vision of the future and open up space for wonder; inviting us to experience and to dream.
About Cross-Cuts
Cross-Cuts is a video essay series from M+ that cuts across curatorial disciplines—visual art, moving image, and design and architecture—to draw unexpected connections between works in the museum’s collections. Each episode pairs a writer from outside of M+ with a video director, weaving objects together under a shared theme.