Karaoke

A claymation skater-boy love story that swings.

Minus is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong's first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin's Concept albums.

PARADE PROTEST compares a 1930 Taiwanese film outtake of a procession during Japanese colonial rule to the 2014 Taiwanese student protests against pro- China economic policies. The diptych traverses across varying truths in audio-visual documentation between the past and the present by offering a nuanced understanding of power and self-determination on the island of Taiwan.

The film depicts a group of children playing in a swimming pool in Aceh, Indonesia, working through their fear of water following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

A meditation on urban living, the film consists of a static shot of an apartment block in Kuala Lumpur, as the sounds and dialogue of the city pass by disconnected from the ability to see where any given sound is coming from.

Camera Trap is a comparative work using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current camera traps set in the Borneo rainforests. A visual and aural comparison. The domesticated vs the wild. Staged vs remote capture. Caged sounds vs field recordings.

"Chong brings queer chops into new sightlines with this elegant mini-essay on desire... A series of peek-a-boo mattes admit moments glimpsed in passing. Scars of seeing. The throbbing, hand-processed emulsion begins with clouds then descends through traffic to arrive at the aching towards some new moment of release." — Mike Hoolboom