7:40pm
** Director Q&A following the screening
Chen Yin-ju and James T. Hong are an interdisciplinary art team, producing installations, performances, and film and video works. They have exhibited in the Pompidou Center in Paris and Riena Sofia Museum in Madrid and shown films in the San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival and International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam. They are best known for experimental documentaries portray some of histories deepest ironies in a style that is highly watchable and often funny, despite the grave overtones of their larger message. Films selected for this program range across the anniversary of Hitler’s death, Japanese biological warfare in WWII and the sexual capital of the white man.
-------------FILMS---------------
Suprematist Kapital (2006/5min/Chen Yin-ju and James T. Hong)
A Symbolic History of Kapital. Inspired by Kasimir Malevich's minimalist artworks and the struggles for resources in the age of peak oil, Suprematist Kapital was born of the want to create a visual artwork that could be displayed on many different-sized mediums regardless of resolution, e.g., theater screens, mobile devices, ipod's, etc. Where once technology as progress was an end in itself, it became the handmaiden of capitalist accumulation and war, and is now a form of capital itself in the age of peak oil.
Führerbunker: Touristen, Neo-Nazis, und Andere - 30 April 2009
(2009/6min/ Chen Yin-ju and James T. Hong)
A video document of Hitler’s final bunker in Berlin, Germany on the anniversary of his suicide (30 April).
Wounds That Never Heal
(2009/23min/ Chen Yin-ju and James T. Hong)
A short profile of the victims and lasting legacy of Unit 731 -- a World War II, Japanese, biological warfare facility. Following the first bombing of Tokyo by US forces, the Japanese punished entire villages and counties in China where the bombers crash landed by spraying diseases from crop-duster-like airplanes. The effects can still be seen on the bodies of those living in the region today.
Total Mobilization (2005/8min/Chen Yin-ju and James T. Hong)
Migration is fact; immigration is destiny. The disappearance of White America could mean the end of the United States of America, as we have known it. The West could be reduced to Europe and few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without America, the West becomes a miniscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass. TOTAL MOBILIZATION is an evocative, ironic, and bombastic experimental video that ostensibly focuses on a group of struggling ants. The open-minded will see it as a trenchant metaphor of nativist fears; the closed-minded will see it as a document of the truth.
Transactions (2008/8min/Chen Yin-ju)
This video shows one example of how Asian parents devote themselves to their grown children. Here a mother works tirelessly for rich clients so she can send her daughter to study in the USA. The montage illustrates the detailed procedure of dressmaking, and the phone conversation covers credit card expenses, converted from US dollars to Taiwanese yuan.
Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms (2004/23min/James T. Hong)
In TAIPEI 101: A TRAVELOGUE OF SYMPTOMS an Asian American encounters the semblant operations of Americanization on a pilgrimage to Taiwan. He discovers that Taipei 101 -- currently the world's tallest building -- Taiwan's culture, and his own consciousnesses are indelibly marked by globalization, America, capitalism, and the transnational power of white men.
FOR MORE INFO ON JAMES T HONG AND CHEN YIN-JU, SEE:
http://www.zukunftsmusik.com
http://www.yinjuchen.com
