Terror Nullius
Director: Soda Jerk
Australia/ 2018/ 55 minutes/ 彩Colour/ in English with Chinese Subtitle
Breathless Animals
Director:Lei Lei
The Mainland/ 2019/ 68 minutes/ Colour/ in Putonghua with English Subtitle
Known for her use of found footage combined with superposition, fragmentation, and image manipulation, the video artist Yan Wai Yin creates video works infused with a unique voice. Yan’s works often take off from a personal, subjective point of view and then intervene into a society in disarray, unveiling the tensions between the intimate, the individual, and the collective.
In this edition of Artist’s Choice, Yan chooses videos by the Australian artist duo’s Terror Nullius and the Mainland director Lei Lei’s Breathless Animals. Terror Nullius appropriates notable icons from Australian cinema and turns them into a narrative that is at once hilarious and critical—it is an intelligent and visually engrossing film essay on the tradition and culture of Australia. On the other hand, Breathless Animals veers between a microscopic family chronicle and a narrative of the progress of society and history at large, probing through unconventional means into unrecognised truths and the past in an ordinary Chinese family.