 music video features soundscapes and footage from immersing ourselves in nature as we ground in our souls as bodies existing outside of isolation, capitalism, gender dysphoria, and the prison state. 

 was written together at the top of a mountain in Happy Valley in Tongva Land, so-called East Los Angeles at Sarita Doe and Champoy yurt dwelling ceremony.



 unearths diasporic queer spirituality and harnesses our ancestral languages - Urdu and Kapampangan.



 is a prayer to honor the bonds of our love that expands and brings regeneration into our multiverse. 

 is a spell to inspire deeper connections to our Earth and welcome in freedom and joy for ourselves and kin.

corporations own our water, pushed out BIPOC farmers, and tourism poisoned the salton sea. as water protectors we must bloom new beginnings.


BLOOM

Why should diaspora mean holding my fingers before my eyes in order to pause forever to try to see what i was once told. i need to depart somehow, -- or fucking arrive.

maybe people like us live in the past and through it, murmurs of places and memories that we didn't even live ourselves, constant convergence of reality and could-be's and parallel stories. but in the instance of trying to live life and get through the day it's been pulling me back hard, with each day it pulls further back because i let it. why should diaspora mean holding my fingers before my eyes in order to pause forever to try to see what i was once told. i need to depart somehow, -- or fucking arrive. and so this is the last of this type of video i hope to make. i want life in my new work. have 

 as an introduction to the beginning, a last few touches.

Corridors, Highways 

 is an experimental film, retracing the autoethnography of a transmasculine member of the Chinese diaspora. 

This short film is the first of a series to come, it is born out of my political self-recovery and reflections on the meaning and crucial importance of racial passing in the context of a white-majority country.

I saw myself reflected in the little girl of the world famous photo from the Vietnam War, then found myself to be haunted by her, this film is the first in a series, that explores art as an act of mourning and of holding emotional space for the common experience of marginalized people's uncanny relationship to the dead and the wounded.

Embodiment

is a ﬁlm exploring a trans* person's connection to their heritage - one not passed down by blood or lineage, but instead by a shared experience of oppression. To self-medicate is our heritage and has been a way for trans* folk to reclaim their agency and body back from those that treat their opinion on our experience as the absolute truth. Fear and access to knowledge make it diﬃcult for many of those to connect with their trans* heritage, and in this ﬁlm we follow one person in their journey to overcome these obstacles.


Ultimately, one message becomes clear: we are here, we deserve equal access to healthcare, and we deserve to feel at home in our bodies.

Medica_ed


our non-linear disentanglement invocation channeling the hybridity of animals+cyborgs+transhumans: the laman haywan and labuad meklooq (kampangan_urdu for: flesh beast and earth creature) - the multispecies inhabitants of 2022 & 3033 living on ecocide 3urth: the corpses of natural ecosystems of planet earth murdered by apathetic humans and artificial intelligence seeking vengeance. our wails ascend us out of pits of lava + untouched seabeds contaminated by technological trash + nuclear shrapnel. as laman haywan and labuad meklooq, we symbiotically conjoin in the wreckage of deserted laboratories, holy ruins, & subaltern fires to evolve and reckon with our retribution.




joining together to change for
nourishment and those who feed
to transfuse
(zyg) - joining together
(mut) - to change
(troph) - for nourishment / those who feed
(00ze) - to transfuse


PRIMALDIAL MAGMA_ZYGMUTROPHOOZE

 is an exploration and call for Black people to escape the terms and identities created by western imperialism. Two lovers run away from Babylon, a subversive look at gender and its trappings within the Black diaspora.

Pandrog

 asks what it means to be like all the boys. An assemblage of animation, found footage and personal archives pieces together queer identities from myriad perspectives.

comme tous les garçons

 is an essay film comprised of layers and hybrid cartographies: I aim to question, although abstractly, the masculinisation of gender, especially in the context of being an immigrant in europe. 

I demand accountability by european states and I demand accountability by whiteness, by my own people, by model minorities. I try to embody the feelings of dysphoria that are imposed upon us as racialised people, and how being trans is both an escape and something you can’t touch, something i don’t want to talk about. I body-build in order to not be, I body-build the same way I use the internet, the same way the internet is an infinite murky duplication. The film traces histories within West Asia, through histories of colonisation via the Ottoman, Russian and Persian Empires, arriving in the Soviet Union and across to the present Post Soviet and Post Colonial stance. Many of the ideas expressed in the film I brewed up during moments of transition while we were living in Berlin, experiencing very liberal european ‘tolerant’ types of racisms and transphobias.

lap(se)

NOW I CLOSE MY EYES THE WORLD I SEE IS SO BEAUTIFUL

 samples lines from the Taiwanese New Wave ﬁlm Yi Yi, and those borrowed words, those intergenerational whisperings in Chinese dialect, had me pondering at how ancestors and descendants create bridges — across time, and if you’re diasporic, across global space. 

These bridges feel all too easily invisible to me, but what would it look like if we were strolling on them? What if we jumped off? Would we create another bridge, or open up a new dimension?


The music video begins with me undergoing a self-conducted ritual, shaving my head to the bare scalp. I initiate a process of remembrance and imagining, and what follows are the adventures the many versions of my 爷爷 / yeye / grandfather and I have, roaming around together in different worlds. In our shared, “objective” reality, this man’s fondness brimmed at his eyes, never spilling over, careful not to stain. In the parallel dimension of this music video, we go on the journeys we were never able to, promenades becoming quests in the numerous destinations of Second Life.


We relive the moments never captured on camera, aided by Google Street View. Images of us are projected on my skin, and shining these memories in their reverted form of captured light, I absorb their meaning once again. I ingest these moments, feeding on them, nourishing them and nourishing myself on them, thus keeping the portals open to the worlds beyond, within, and between.

now i close my eyes the world i see is so beautiful

The artist, Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer has been putting together an archive of their great grandfather’s documents: he was a Georgian Marxist economist executed by Stalin in the purges of the 1930s. The film looks at some of his documents, including the execution papers, alongside a poetic essay on the Caucasus/West Asia/the objectification of the post Soviet.

This is an introduction to a longer piece that is still in the works, which began as a metadata and digitisation research project as part of their Librarianship Masters.

walking before 

Showcasing an imaginative queer masculine body-scape, where the spices used in Chinese cooking grow as spectacular natural landscapes. This work is a hybrid of filmed performance, CGI animation and sound art. It draws on Chinese myth and a sense of belonging from an Asian queer diasporic perspective.

is a meeting point of transgressive queer desire, a dream homeland and reality. We are what we eat, we are what we remember, we are what we believe.

centralizes my queer gaze with the aesthetic of Sino-futurism, and intersectional layering of Asian diasporic experience, queer masculinity and ancient Chinese myth.

Inspired by my childhood memory and critical reflection on the construction of Asian identity, I believe ‘home’ is somewhere filled with the smell of good food; somewhere your loved one makes an effort to treat you with delicious and time-consuming food as a token of their love and care. I invite audiences into an other-worldly queer dreamality; creating a welcoming, intimate atmosphere in a digital realm which celebrates queer Asian diasporic and other marginalised identity.

I hope a different political discourse can be established through this work, and it can enable cross-cultural communication and a healing conversation about queer Asian migrant identity in the West.

Categories

Diaspora