Department of Visual Studies

Located throughout the city, The Good Host can be experienced as one or a series of encounters that provoke deliberation. The aim is to unfix the viewer's perception of prescribed uses for urban space, and reconsider their own agency within it.

Catalogue entry for Joseph Clement's film "Integral Man", which explores the highly acclaimed Integral House, designed by Shim Sutcliffe Architects, the home-cum-concert hall of renowned mathematician Jim Stewart as its owner prepares for his final performance.

The exhibition VENICE DESIGN 2018 PRESENTED was curated by Camille Guibaud and Anaïs Hammoud, organized by the GAA Foundation, hosted and supported by the European Cultural Centre in the context of the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2018. The exhibition was presented in Palazzo Michiel, Venice, Italy, from 26 May - 25 November 2018.

In 1965 Indonesia, the CIA helped Suharto spread false reports on a coup plot by the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), contributing to an anticommunist purge; that same year, a farmer chances upon a film shoot by a foreign crew of a fake moon landing and has his tongue cut off. The latter is a speculative invention of Yosep Anggi Noen's fiction film, The Science of Fictions (2019). In Daniel Hui's hybrid speculative fiction / documentary Snakeskin (2014), set in the year 2066 in Singapore, references to the 1950s Chinese leftist movements form part of the film's excavation of national myths and half-forgotten memories. Noen's imagined past and Hui's speculative future meet in Cold War secrecies that periodically haunt the cinema of the region.

Before they were located in 2016 by the Asian Film Archive (AFA) in the China Film Archive (CFA), Huaqiao xuelei (Blood and Tears of the Overseas Chinese, dir. Tsai Wen-chin 1946), and Haiwai zhenghun (Spirit of the Overseas Chinese, dir. Wan Hoi-ling 1946), were believed to be lost. Produced by Zhong hua dianying zhi pian chang (Zhong Hua Film), Huaqiao xuelei and Haiwai zhenghun are Singapore's earliest postwar Chinese-language feature films from an understudied time in the island nation's film history. According to Chew Tee Pao, archivist at the AFA, the archive had "put out several calls for film elements during the AFA's Lost Films Search (2006) and Save Our Film campaign (2010) to the public and through the AFA's professional networks but to no avail" (Chew Tee Pao, email to author, March 9, 2021). It was only when Chew attended a training course at the British Film Institute and connected with members of the CFA, that the prints of the two films were finally located. Both films were then restored by the CFA and subtitled by the AFA. Independent of the AFA's efforts, the CFA provided the Hong Kong Film Archive (HKFA) with a reference disc copy of Haiwai zhenghun in November 2013 and the HKFA screened the film on March 15th, 2014 in a program titled "Re-discovering Pioneering Females in Early Chinese Cinema." Frank Bren cites Wan Hoi-ling as "the territory's first-known homegrown female film director," of whom much remains unknown (2014, 173). Within this claim of "homegrown" status lie Wan Hoi-ling's contributions to cinema and a transnational trajectory across China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. A key concern of this chapter is the possibility of thinking "home" capaciously, beyond the index of national cinema. Bren notes that while most of Wan Hoi-ling's filmography is lost, a collection of her film scripts remain at the New York State Archives (NYSA) in Albany, New York (2014, 175-83). Narratives of Wan Hoi-ling's life are often traced through her work and life with the groundbreaking film theorist, novelist, and director Hou Yao. In 1940, Hou and Wan, partners in work and life, moved to Singapore from Hong Kong and produced seven Malay-language films for the Singapore-based Shaw Brothers Limited. They were in captivity from 1942 to 1945 during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. Hou was executed during that period. After her release, Wan made Haiwai zhenghun (1946) and Nanyang xiaojie (Miss Nanyang, 1947), and the latter film remains to be found.

This paper will focus on the works by two artists, Isaac Julien and Francis Alÿs, who primarily work with migration themes, yet have different politics of aesthetics. Specifically, the research paper will primarily focus on Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010) and Francis Alÿs’s Don’t Cross the Bridge before You Get to the River (2008).

Jia Zhangke’s The World engages in the process of cultural translation through both transcription and transmission in light of Rey Chow’s translation approach. Therefore, on the one hand, the film strikes the audiences with its indexicality of Chinese social reality; on the other hand, Jia’s reassembling of historical realities brings up the problems of globalization and modernism in postsocialist China by his treatment of different spaces and the virtual world.