CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA PRESENTS:
Landscape Notations: Echoes of Hong Kong
With curator/filmmaker Yan Wai Yin presenting in person.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 20TH @ MONO NO AWARE : CINEMA ARTS NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION
33 FLATBUSH AVENUE, BROOKLYN NEW YORK - LIMITED ATTENDANCE TO 30 - MASKS AVAILABLE
DOORS 7PM – STARTS PROMPTLY AT 7:30PM – FREE OR $5 SUGGESTED DONATION

TRT, 90 minutes. Additional time for discussion / Q & A with Yan Wai Yin IN PERSON

Landscape Notations: Echoes of Hong Kong
Where does one begin when asked to describe a place called home? The works in this screening confront the lesser-discussed remnants of collective struggles, examining how systemic oppression provokes alternative approaches to documenting urban landscapes and the sentiment of home in the making. These seemingly peripheral or isolated perspectives on the urban landscape reflect not only a disorientation towards the quotidian but also serve as situated witnesses in such changing times.

PROGRAM:

Lost a part of
CHAN Hau Chun / Hong Kong / 30:00 / 2022
Stagnation in the body cannot keep up with the changes in real life. When memory of the trembling hand constantly haunting, when the cavity is filled by artificial materials – if body remembers, how should it response with the years of traumatic past?  Three of us, describe the indescribable body changes try picking up the hints and signs.

Two Traverses
Andy LI / Hong Kong / 13:09 / 2022
On 27th December 2020, four days ahead of the Yau Ma Tei Carpark Building demolition, the newly completed Tuen Mun Chek Lap Kok Tunnel Road became open to traffic.
The Yau Ma Tei Carpark Building was a spectacle in the urban landscape of Hong Kong: The Gascoigne Road Flyover, running through the building and forming an overhead tunnel, was built to bypass the existing surface road. Meanwhile, the Tuen Mun Chek Lap Kok Tunnel became the city’s longest tunnel.
“Two Traverses” documents two trips on this particular day: the last traversal of Yau Ma Tei Carpark Tunnel and the first through Tuen Mun Chek Lap Kok Tunnel. With various visual contrasts: day and night, old and new, shortest and longest in duration, a history of a place is being written through celluloid.

an inimitable place called home
Jolene MOK / Hong Kong / 05:33 / 2023
This work was created to reflect a constant wanderer’s overdue homecoming before yet another departure.
The numerous possibilities of navigating Hong Kong are truly extraordinary. The film’s basic premise is to show Hong Kong’s unique city-scape visualized through land, sea, and air. For example, various mass transit vehicles traverse the city recurrently and are juxtaposed with free-flying sparrows living in their very own humble neighborhoods.
I am drawn to the poetry found in mundane, everyday scenes in Hong Kong. I wanted to magnify this uniqueness and beauty by using the analogue medium of black and white 16mm film. I hand-processed the film stock myself. The flaws that appeared during the film-handling process, such as the dust traces and scratch marks, are important assets that work with a beautiful poem by Hong Fu to present an orchestrated work to audiences.

Too Long Ago, Nor Far
YAN Wai Yin / Hong Kong / 13:15 / 2024
When I first took up this Super 8 camera, I knew I was about to leave my home. Too Long Ago, Not Far, shot between 2019 to 2023, alludes to the Huaying Tongyu [華英通語, meaning: interchangeable expressions between Chinese and English, first published in 1867 in New York], the earliest English textbook for Chinese people that uses Cantonese phonetic notation to teach the pronunciation of English words. This seamless editing mode offers me the base to record everything in the city as notations, things that I want to look at over and over again. Perhaps by the time I go back, nothing changes, everything remains the same. As the Chinese saying goes, horse keeps on running, and people keeps on dancing.

Going to Never-go
Wong Chung Yan & Wong Chung Long / 24:55 / 2022
Prologue Suppressed anxieties secretly attack me in the midst of silence. Once again — by holding onto an unopened notion of ease, we can evade our past. Even if we escape the pressure that opens it up, the inverted reflection becomes larger. Memories intermingled with the imaginative overlap with reality, eating away at the dark night…
The rain is falling! The rain is falling! Saa1, saa1, saa1, saa1. 
By chance, a sound, just appearing a little. Gazing at the repeating reverberations of each day, do you recall things that cannot be revealed to the world? Like shaking an unopened box, unknown things are still in the palms of your hands.
A record of our move from the city into a village house in Kam Tin in 2019, during a period corresponding to the social movement and the subsequent two-and-a-half years of the sense of suppressive era.
Directors’ Note How to transition / get rid of that private and almost suffocating sense of vigilance? The two tried to look at the moments that reverberated everyday in the rural life after moving away from the city, recording the impact, co-creation and life during and after the 2019 social movement. From time to time, subtle signs of dailies trigger lingering memories.
The sense of consciousness that remained in daily lives at that time was reflected in a highly dynamic handheld record, or using vague enough imaging to generate intuitive shots. We attempts to reorganise those audio-visual material with a large number of mixed cuts to describe the moment of consciousness that evokes overlapping memories; animations intervene in moving images are blending to break the illusion of "moving image" and out of "frame" as an act to spread on different aspects of life.

Total running time for the PROGRAM: ˜90 minutes

BIOS :

CHAN Hau-chun
Chan is based in Hong Kong. She graduated from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Her works include photography, video, and installation. Her photographic work People Under the Bridge was collected by Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and her graduation film 32 and 4 was nominated for Best Documentary at the Golden Horse Awards in 2015 and won the Principal Prize at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

Andy LI
LI San-Kit (b.1994, Hong Kong) is an experimental filmmaker and a photo-based artist. His practice brings the machine into the periphery of the image, reestablishing a visible layer which preserves the intent of image-making and embodies an application of rationale. With the machine as the agent, the photographed subject binds closely to the documentation process. His work takes the form of 16mm film, photography, video, installation and photo-objects. Li is a member of Floating Projects Collective and co-founder of Negative Space (2019–22). He is currently living and working in Hong Kong.

Jolene MOK
Jolene Mok (b.1984) is an experimental artist, she mainly works in video, film and photography. Mok earned her M.F.A. in Experimental & Documentary Arts at Duke University in 2013. Mok interweaves both practical and theoretical components through emerging situations. Since 2011, she has been actively taking part in artist-in-residency programs worldwide, including Finland, Japan, Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands & U.S among others. In 2012, she was invited to join as a guest resident artist to explore deep-sea seeps off Barbados, a major scientific research expedition aboard. In 2013, she sailed the waters of the intl. territory of Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago just 10 degrees latitude from the north pole. In 2015, Mok was awarded the Asian Cultural Council-Jackie Chan Fellow. In 2022, she held her first homecoming solo exhibition Life Is Elsewhere: You Know Where To Find Me hosted by 1a Space in Hong Kong.

YAN Wai Yin
YAN Wai Yin (b.1994) works and lives in Hong Kong and London. Yan excels at the juxtaposition and insertion of literary texts in narratives. Through shifting personal observations and the temporal, emotional distance in different texts, Yan inscribes quotidian fragments of memories lingering in space and objects. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: M+ Museum, Blindspot Gallery, Ben Brown Gallery (Hong Kong), Galerie Urs Meile (Beijing), Yale University (US), Kunstmuseum Bonn, European Media Art Festival (Germany), Open City Documentary Festival (UK), IFFR (Netherlands), Videoex (Switzerland), Image Forum (Japan), EXiS (Korea) among others.

Wong Chung Yan & Wong Chung Long (bungee neighbour)

Wong Chung Yan
Chung's video works combine experimental documentary, field recordings and stop-motion. Her past work building blocks has been shortlisted at South Taiwan Film Festival (Taiwan), and awarded jury recommendations in ifva (HK) and festival du cinéma de Brive (France). Currently a member of Black window, a collectively-run space, kitchen, info library and irregular events. She curated a screening event 'Calling the Figure of Mystery' for 4 local experimental documentaries in 2022, with a 3-year co-operative piece Going to Never-go during COVID and suppressed social state. Supported by soundpockets' Artists Supporting Program, she developed an ongoing project 'a secluded trail towards an unoccupied___' which explored soundscapes, animal sounds, human voice intervention and trails previously.

Wong Chung Long
Long has extended from animation creation to focusing on the technical exploration of ‘feedback’. Through various analog devices, he connects different circuits to establish feedback loops, generating images or sounds with the motion senses experienced from his animation background. He engages in improvisational creation, and documents his creative process or inspired scene through the fictional persona of "mimic kappa” using illustrations, text, and comic-style storytelling. His animation work includes "losing sight of a longed place" (2017). In recent years, he has performed improvisational shows with Chung (bungee neighbour 伸縮籬笆) at different venues in Hong Kong such as Sai Coeng, Tong 3, twenty alpha 20a and Black Window,. Currently a member of black window, which is a collectively-run space, kitchen, info library and irregular events.

MONO NO AWARE SCREENING SERIES:
The CONNECTIVITY THROUGH CINEMA series will present the work of artists, film-makers and curators who are traveling or presenting special interactive programs in-person. Our hope is to engage the community by showing work with a focus on post-screening discussion. This series is made possible by support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).