21.6.2025 14:00
Chan Hau Chun, Chan Ting, Huang Ting, Lo Lai Lai Natalie, Chung Wong, Long Wong, Zimu Zhang
This screening program features six young artists from Hong Kong whose practices embody the emerging perma-cinema movement. Inspired by permaculture, perma-cinema refers to a cinematic approach deeply rooted in sustainability—encompassing filmmaking, daily life, and community building. Set in the context of Hong Kong, an island-city shaped by border politics, neoliberal pressures, and cultural hybridity, perma-cinema also serves as a form of self-sustaining art, which acts to maintain one’s own autonomy of memory and affect against the societal inertia and isolation amid global and local upheavals.
The artists’ film and art practices are rooted in their own ways of cultivating sustainable and equitable living, such as practicing urban farming, village sojourns, running a community vegan restaurant, and various forms of cultural activism. Their gradual, resilient, and introspective endeavors reflect our era’s scarcest resource: hope. Far from fleeting optimism, but a "slow hope," as German environmental historian Christof Mauch describes it—one forged through endurance of trauma, despair, and crisis. It is a communal, incremental narrative, distinct from the glare of technological futurism, yet a vital force in confronting planetary challenges.
Under this screening theme, the artists will present recent and in-progress films, followed by an online discussion. Artists include (in alphabetical order):
Chan Hau Chun: an independent documentary filmmaker and photographer. Her films have always shed light on marginal communities in Hong Kong's urban dwelling with sensitive and respectful portraits. In recent years, she has embraced a more micro-material scrutiny on urban-rural landscape of both natural and built structures. https://www.chanhauchun.com/
Chan Ting: a multidisciplinary artist working with diverse medium and poetic dialogue among image and sound. She often works with found material, urban space and natural elements, coordinating them with a multisensorial experience. Her current film project explores human-bird relationship via birdwatching and rural life in the Hong Kong New Territories. https://chan-ting.com/
Huang Ting: a multi-media storyteller and filmmaker whose practice has connected her with broader Hong Kong social art tissues and self-organizing creative grassroot units. She has been living and creating in the rural village in the New Territories for the recent years. Her current work focuses on the ecology of borders.
Lo Lai Lai Natalie: a prolific ecoartist, farmer and researcher. She has been practicing farming with the local farming collective Sangwoodgoon for more than fifteen years in the city's northern rural area. Her filmworks often feature the intricate relationships of farming labour, soil, seeds, insects, and many more farming world actors under the evolving sociopolitical environment of the city. http://lolailai.com
Chung Wong: she practices film utilizing diverse audiovisual languages including documentary, experimentation, field recordings, and stop-motion. Her recent projects offer speculative soundwalks that differentially explore the reverberant soundscapes of idle spaces, water tunnels, and fish pond habitats under developmental threats, incorporating experiments with field recordings, vocals, and bird songs. https://vimeo.com/user61607488
Long Wong: an experimental artist practicing animation, manga drawing and sound improvisation. He employs real-time audio-visual electronic circuits to connect analog equipment that generate video and sound feedback as moving image creation. https://mimickapoaaa.wixsite.com/mimickappa
Curator: Zimu Zhang, an environmental humanities scholar working on visual culture, eco-cinema and ecofeminist arts. https://zimu-z.com/ (Zimu will join the screening in person).