Two Lucas Artists Program Fellows, TT Takemoto and Genevieve Quick, will each screen three short films – see list below – followed by a Q&A with Abby Chen, Asian Art Museum Contemporary Art Curator and Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. TT Takemoto will present the following films: After Bed (2023), Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung) (2021), and Lion in the Wind (2023). Genevieve Quick will present the following films: Rockette Odyssey (2020), Megaphone (2019), and Hello World (2022).
ABOUT THE FILMS:
After Bed: Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic. Scavenged from color tests, the sole Asian America woman in James Broughton’s erotic film, The Bed, pulses with queerness through the celluloid cracks of 16 mm, tape, and nail polish.
Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung): Soaring through the complicated life of San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung (1889-1959) and her insatiable desire for women and belonging within a sea of white military heroes, nurses, and celebrities as it delves into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy.
Lion in the Wind: A fugue for forgetting windmills in the West. This camera-less “emulsion lift” film was made from a discarded 35 mm reel of a Hong Kong martial arts western featuring Jet Li as a kung fu master who loses his memory and fights bandits and windmills as he makes his journey to Chinatown.
Rockette Odyssey: Using traditional East Asian celadon ceramics as the framework for fantastical narratives that explore Asian American diasporic identity, this film is part of Quick’s Planet Celadon series. By exaggerating ideas of alienness, futurity, and tradition, she explores alternative forms of communication to address the challenges of communication globally and intergalactically.
Megaphone: Made while in residency at Recology, Quick considers global manufacturing, technology, communication, culture, and transnationality in an immersive installation that includes audio, video, and interactive components. Megaphone borrows from the framework of silent films and transforms mundane voice mail messages that an anonymous woman left for her Vietnamese speaking mother, and merges familial and global communications with fantasy of sending messages to the universe.
Hello World: This video features CETI (Celadonian ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), a fantastical research consortium that facilitates communication between Planet Celadon and Earth. As the narrative unfolds through live performance and a video game, the performers encounter a black hole, the multiverse, and communication outages that the scientists attempt to remedy. The finale blurs the boundaries between live performance and gaming, extending Quick’s exploration of global identity and politics in media-based practices.
This event is a related program of P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists, an exhibition jointly organized by Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Program and the ICA San Jose. The exhibition is on view at the ICA San Jose until August 11, 2024.