Taking for inspiration a line by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, "Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, there is a Garden. I Will Meet You There" (2023) is the account of a healing process and a meditation on human suffering. Combining found footage, documentation from the artist’s own travels, and animations of the mythological centaur Chiron (renowned as a healer and prophet), Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong… asks how spiritual practice can help us to move beyond individual subjectivity to perceive life and death from a cosmic perspective.
An extravagant film that appears as a message from outer space. A cryptic cocktail of thermodynamic laws, Egyptian gods and extra-stellar intelligence.
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End Transmission
By Yin-Ju Chen & James T. Hong
15 min. 40 sec. | HD | black & white | stereo | 2010
Strange messages are sent to humanity. They are frightening and poetical at the same time; they report of a takeover and the end of it all. The messages alternate with ominous black-and-white images of lifeless cities under control, frozen industrial landscapes, sterile laboratory machinery and nature in an abandoned state. "We were here before you". "Fear is natural". A final warning: the planet is re-colonized, and human life only seems possible in the protected, artificial and enclosed environment of a large-scale indoor resort.
Stephen Hawking once wrote, "If aliens ever visit us, the outcome will be much as when Christopher Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans". In this case, who are the colonizers and who are the natives?
In a sewing workshop, the making of a piece of clothing is filmed in detail while we listen to a phone conversation between a Taiwanese mother and her daughter, the director of this film. The mother spends her days and nights toiling away so she can afford to send her daughter to school in the United States. They are discussing the credit card bill.
Not only their physical distance, but especially their emotional one manifests itself in an increasingly emphatic way. Their worlds are light-years away from one another, which leads to miscommunication and lack of understanding.
A talk between two people who love each other is reduced to a business transaction; after all, the language of the dollar is universal. Transactions is about the boundaries of a love that supposedly knows no bounds.
Two memories of alcohol abuse -- reconstructed from found sound tracks, and put into a metaphorical image montage. Two women from different generations talk about their life struggles and how they became alcoholics.
Three Decades of Static
4 min | HD | Color | Stereo | No dialogue | 2006
This video work combines both performance and video art. The artist portrays a state of stress -- the stress from self-pressure and the fear of turning 30 years old. Using a unigue architectural structure and video techonology, the artist imagines three decades of herself.
A symbolic history of Kapital -- a symbolic history of the West. Inspired by Kasimir Malevich's minimalist artworks and the struggles for resources in the age of peak oil, Suprematist Kapital was born of the want to create a visual artwork that could be displayed on many different-sized mediums regardless of resolution, e.g., theater screens, mobile devices, ipod's, etc.
When once technology as progress was an end in itself, it became the handmaiden of capitalist accumulation and war, and is now a form of capital itself in the age of peak oil.
Total Mobilization
By Yin-Ju Chen & James T. Hong
8 minutes | color | stereo | MiniDV | 2005-2007
Migration is fact; immigration is destiny.
The disappearance of White America could mean the end of the United States of America as we have known it. The West could be reduced to Europe and few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without America, the West becomes a miniscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass. Video preview