Supported by the Chanel Culture Fund, the festival is a place for creators and the general public to discover “more nutritious” works – films, videos and artworks that are rich sources of inspiration – says Wing.
Phantom Frequencies: An Audiovisual Experience by Wing Shya x nnscya brings together a range of the veteran photographer’s 35mm film images, some never seen in public before, alongside an experimental soundscape crafted by musician Nnscya, real name Annisa Cheung Ching-yu.
The collaboration between two generations of Hong Kong creatives will be enhanced by interactive media artist Samson Wong Sing-wun, whose audio-reactive design technology will transform Wing’s photography in real time, in response to Nnscya’s performance.
Wong, who has worked on international blockbusters including the Transformers and X-Men franchises, won the prize for best visual effects at the 55th Golden Horse Awards for work on Zhang Yimou’s Shadow (2018).
Silke Schmickl, Chanel lead curator for moving image at M+, says the newly commissioned Phantom Frequencies is an “unusual, machine-generated activation of still photography” with live-performed sound frequencies, in a collaboration that allows artists of different generations to “experiment with new formats and respond to each other’s sensibilities”.
Before the performance of Wing’s work at sunset, the festival’s first-day afternoon programme will comprise screenings of “Touch Me, Touch Me Not” (a compilation of nine short films) and “Fearless & Fierce: the Female Gaze” (nine moving-image works), a screen-printing workshop with artist-printmaker Kinchoi Lam, and a vinyl-only DJ set.
The screenings and workshop will repeat on each day of the festival.
The festival’s main objective is to champion independent moving-image practices from across Asia, from original visual languages to cross-cultural dialogues, “and their interconnections with other art forms such as visual art, photography, design, performing arts and music”, says Schmickl.
The festival, she adds, will highlight “formal and conceptual correspondences between historical and contemporary works” through various mediums, such as experimental and expanded cinema, performance films, investigational documentaries, and animation.
“The films are indie, as the vast majority of them have been produced independently and without a commercial distribution purpose in mind, yet their artistic qualities and unorthodox nature set them apart from, let’s say, indie art-house cinema,” she says.
“Avant-garde is a signifier for the experimental ideas and new approaches these artists introduced through their works at the time of their making.”
Existing M+ collections informed the basis of the festival’s film selection, says Schmickl. “A good example is ‘Secrets and Lies’, a programme that features three speculative essay-films by award-winning M+ collection artists Ho Tzu-nyen, Bo Wang and Lee Kai-chung, who investigate chapters of Asia’s unresolved Cold War history using Hong Kong as a vantage point.”
Other Asian artists to feature include Nick Deocampo, an award-winning filmmaker, film historian and pioneering advocate of queer cinema in the Philippines; Lu Yang, an internationally acclaimed, Shanghai-based new media artist; and Zhang Peili, a mainland Chinese contemporary artist and video art pioneer.