Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, Che-Yu Hsu, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Ho Tam
One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower
19:00
In conjunction with Dirt in the Shape of You, Sung Hwan Kim has curated an evening of four short films by Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, Che-Yu Hsu, Dan Taulapapa McMullin and Ho Tam. Made between 2001 and 2024, in Taiwan, Canada, Samoa and Vietnam, the films each find their own way of telling stories that sit outside official accounts.
A man dies for the first time. Siamese twins undergo separation surgery live on national TV. A hotel earns the title of the world’s worst tourist destination. A one-eyed fish swims up the plumbing of a house. Ten Asian men live in Toronto. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower moves between video diary, fairy tale and science fiction, painting personal accounts of life lived against, with and through a country’s history.
SYNOPSIS
副本人 (Single Copy), 2019, dir. Che-Yu Hsu
In 1979, Chang Chung-Jen and Chang Chung-I became the first conjoined twins in Taiwan to be separated by surgery, a story followed closely by the national press. Forty years later, Chung-Jen died suddenly. Single Copy turns to the brother who remains.
Hsu scans and remodels Chung-I’s body and films him repeating ordinary movements: folding and unfolding a napkin, wandering around an abandoned bus, riding a three-wheeled scooter. Between the 3D-printed body and the living one, the film asks what it means to be the single copy left behind.
Still Lives… in the Americas, 2003, dir. Ho Tam
Part documentary, part fiction, Still Lives… in the Americas introduces ten Asian men living in Toronto. Each is shown twice: in a painting by Ho Tam and in a video portrait made alongside it.
Rather than building a dramatic story, the film stays with the everyday – work, routine, getting by. Tam does not hide behind the camera. His presence as painter, filmmaker and acquaintance is part of every encounter, and the line between portrait and self-portrait stays open.
Sinalela, 2001, dir. Dan Taulapapa McMullin
“My name is Sinalela and this is my movie.” Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s fa‘afafine retelling of Cinderella opens by claiming both the name and the story. Fa‘afafine – “in the manner of a woman” – is an identity defined through relationships in Samoa, and one that missionaries, anthropologists and documentary filmmakers have long presumed to explain from the outside.
Homemade in Samoa with a hand-held camera, featuring McMullin’s friends and community, the film answers those accounts through fagogo, Samoan folk storytelling. Cinderella meets the tale of Sina and the Eel, with chant, dance and the supernatural, in a Samoa shown as Samoans know it rather than as tourists see it. Sinalela won Best Short Film at the Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival in 2002.
Linh Giám Tàng Thư (The Curator Ghost), 2024, dir. Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Vietnam, 2075. The memories of the dead are kept in “data caskets”, and access to them runs through a state control room. Three agents, born in different eras, travel through time and through libraries and regenerated minds, on the trail of the museum director Nghiêm Thẩm (1920–1979), whose death remains unexplained.
Shot in black and white and built from photomontage, animation and reenactment, the film plays like a spy thriller. Along the way it passes through artefacts from the Óc Eo and Cham cultures and the ancient Funan kingdom, once a stop on the maritime trade routes between East and West, and asks who gets to keep, and shape, what is remembered.
BIOGRAPHIES
Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần is an artist based in Saigon. Working across moving image, installation, performance, sound, and sculpture, she builds temporal laboratories in which political dreams encounter bodies, materials, and ritual. Her work draws on obsolete technologies, utopian projects, and unfinished Third World imaginaries to explore how different temporalities coexist as collective desire, anticipation, sacrifice, and disappearance. She co-founded the Art Labor collective, which operates at the intersection of visual art, social and life sciences through long-term projects in diverse public contexts and locales.
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa i Sasa’e (American Samoa). Their artist book The Healer’s Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia (2022, 2nd edition 2024) was published by Pu’uhonua Society and Tropic Editions of Honolulu at HT22 the Hawai’i Triennial. Their book of poems Coconut Milk (2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. They co-edited Samoan Queer Lives (2018) published by Little Island Press of Aotearoa. Their work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Musée du quai Branly, Auckland Art Gallery, Bishop Museum, and Honolulu Museum of Art. Their film Sinalela (2001) won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award. Their film 100 Tikis was the opening night film selection of the 2016 Présence Autochtone in Montreal and was an Official Selection in the Fifo Tahiti Film Festival. Taulapapa’s art studio and writing practice is based in Muhheaconneock lands / Hudson, NY, where they live with their husband.
Ho Tam is a Canadian artist whose practice spans video, photography, painting, drawing, graphics and print media. His work often concerns with mass media representations of race and identity politics. He has exhibited in galleries and film festivals across Canada and internationally. Tam was born in Hong Kong. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from McMaster University and a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College. He also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program. Tam’s video work has received various prizes and awards, including the Best Documentary at Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival and the Outstanding Artistic Achievement at OutFest, Los Angeles (both for ‘Books of James’ 2006). In the past ten years, Tam has been focusing on his independent publishing practice under the imprint Hotam Press. His publications can be found in the website hotampress.com
Hsu Che-Yu is an artist based in Taipei and Amsterdam. Previously, Hsu obtained a master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts (Taiwan). Since 2019, he had participated in the residency program in HISK (Ghent, 2019–2020) and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, 2020–2022). In 2022, he begins his two-year art residency in Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Hsu Che-Yu works as an artist who primarily creates animations, videos, and installations that feature the relations between media and memories. What matters to the artist is not simply the history of events traceable through media, but also the construction and visualization of memories, be they private or collective.