Cover ‘Cut Piece’ (1965) by Yoko Ono will be screened at M+’s film festival that promotes avant-garde films (Image: courtesy of Yoko Ono)
‘Cut Piece’ (1965) by Yoko Ono will be screened at M+’s film festival that promotes avant-garde films (Image: courtesy of Yoko Ono)
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Never-seen-before images by Wing Shya, Yoko Ono’s performance art and more— M+ Cinema’s first Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival celebrates the region’s independent, experimental artworks in all their glory
Hong Kong’s M+ Cinema will host its inaugural Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival from May 30 to June 2, 2024, featuring 14 screening programmes and more than 60 films by independent filmmakers such as Ellen Pau, Ruby Yang and Zhang Peili.
The four-day festival, which is supported by Chanel, is the brainchild of Silke Schmickl, M+ Museum’s Chanel lead curator for moving image. When Schmickl, previously the co-founding director of Lowave, a Paris-based video publishing house, relocated to Asia more than a decade ago, she fell in love with Asia’s avant-garde films. In all the places she has worked in, such as Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong, she “discovered amazing historical works” by avant-garde filmmakers, she says in a video call with Tatler.
“I’ve always thought it would be very important to bring these works together in one form or another. At M+, we are in a very good position to [organise a film festival]. It’s meant to acknowledge and celebrate these artists, who speak often about lessons or histories in Asia or things that the broader audience might not be so aware of.”
Above Silke Schmickl fell in love with Asian avant-garde films after she moved to Asia (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung, Visual Voices and M+)
Silke Schmickl fell in love with Asian avant-garde films after she moved to Asia (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung, Visual Voices and M+)
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Some of the films to be screened belong to M+’s own archives while others have been borrowed from artists and other institutions, and all of them have been categorised according to themes, periods and geographical locations. The screenings include the 1965 recording of Japanese artist and singer Yoko Ono’s legendary Cut Piece (1964), a performance art piece in which she let viewers cut her outfits in an attempt to explore themes of vulnerability and violence; and Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau’s Blue (1989-1990), which is a video made out of war photos, meant to evoke the emotional trauma that one feels during wartimes.
She draws a comparison between avant-garde films in the west and Asia, saying that while the subjects and artistic visions in both parts of the world are equally rich, when it comes to awareness, Asian art films have somewhat fallen behind because of a historical lack of distributors or collectives that have systematically preserved these films.
Above Wing Shya (Photo: courtesy of Wing Shya)
Wing Shya (Photo: courtesy of Wing Shya)
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Schmickl observes that, surprisingly, avant-garde films in the west aren’t so different from Asia in terms of subjects and the artists’ visions. The lesser or delayed awareness of Asia’s art films comes from how there weren’t collectives or distributors that systematically collected these films, whereas the west has had a lot of these distributors or catalogue corporations such as New York City’s The Film-Makers’ Cooperative that have “done a great job both in preserving and circulating these works”.
And what makes art films similar in nature is how “very often, these films are very personal. You need to have some courage to make these kinds of films because there’s not really an economy for this kind of filmmaking. [In the past for instance,] these artists often worked in TV stations or radio stations, where they had access to the materials or cameras, and they used them sometimes secretly in the evening to make films with their friends.”
In time, technological development also inspired avant-garde filmmakers to experiment with different tools. “Some of the films that we will be showing from the 1960s are analogue films. Today, we go all the way to AI,” she says. A lot of artists now use the tools that technology gives us to think about how images are brought to us, who decides [what is to be created] and the subversion of technology.”
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With this festival, she’s hoping to give Asia’s avant-garde film scene a push. One of the ways M+ is doing this is by appointing renowned photographer Wing Shya as the art director of the festival. Shya, who is a familiar name in Hong Kong and beyond—thanks to his photography and his work in director Wong Kar-wai’s movies—has collaborated with local young artists to come up with an audiovisual performance for the festival, in which his never-seen-before images will be showcased with a music arrangement by a budding sound artist. “Wing Shya is known for his work with Wong Kar-wai, but [the audience] will discover another side of him. It will also be an opportunity to bring younger artists into the conversation [about art films],” says Schmickl.
The festival will also feature silkscreen printing workshops, talks and other live performances. “We [want to] bring the moving images in touch with performance artists, DJs and dancers, to [show that] films can exist outside the black box of a traditional cinema,” says Schmickl.
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
