Threshold to Threshold:
PENG Zuqiang 彭祖强
Kohei SENGEN 仙元浩平
March 26, 2023 at 7:30pm
AUTOMATA presents:
Threshold to Threshold: PENG Zuqiang 彭祖强 + Kohei SENGEN 仙元浩平
Join us on Sunday, March 26 as we introduce a new film screening series Threshold to Threshold, curated by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
This program includes recent works by two contemporary filmmakers: PENG Zuqiang 彭祖强 and Kohei SENGEN 仙元浩平.
About the Program:
Threshold to threshold, pasts to presents, language colliding with language, one crossroad and the next. The Threshold to Threshold film series embraces these precarious states. The films we are interested in transmit landscapes, people, and histories that are constantly being displaced or forgotten. The challenges presented by the works are various, but because there are thousands of thresholds we can go thousands of places.
The first part will feature two of Peng’s short experimental films. Sight Leak 瞥漏 reflects on fragments of unpublished writing by Roland Barthes from his visit to China in 1973. It concerns gazes and places, with an undercurrent of desire and eroticism. The Cyan Garden 青园 explores the limits of memory as it attempts to give form to the past. The film was in part shot on “Lucky,” a 16mm B&W film stock formerly used for military aerial detection. The second part of the program will show Segen's feature, Song of a Dying Summer 逝く夏の歌. An epic poem of youth, the film, with its coarse-grained super-8mm texture conveys the melancholy of growing up and growing apart.
Runtime: 92 mins
Tickets:
$10 students, members, underemployed
$12 general admission
Click HERE for tickets
Seating is extremely limited, advance reservations strongly encouraged
Note: Masks are required for all events at Automata.
Films:
Sight Leak 瞥漏 (2022, 12 mins, B/W, 16mm & S8mm film transferred to video)
“The moon, the sometimes dark street, trees, it’s warm [...] at last, a certain eroticism possible (that of the warm night).” When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that would become part of his Travels in China (Carnets du voyage en Chine), an underplot of desire in his imagination of the country. Barthes did not publish these writings during his lifetime, and his unsettling judgments about China are refracted in Peng Zuqiang’s work Sight Leak, as fragments of dialogues on class and looking, responding to the reflections on the same matters elicited alongside Barthes’ sense of eroticism. The local tourist in the film travels through different spaces and gatherings, seemingly never looking at anyone, yet silently looking at someone, turning towards a certain collectivity in spite of a foreign homoerotic gaze.
The Cyan Garden 青园 (2022, 8 mins, color & B/W, 16mm film transferred to video)
The Cyan Garden considers the limits of giving form to the past which cannot cohere into memory. In part filmed on ‘Lucky,’ a discontinued b&w 16mm film reel stock intended for military aerial detection, the moving image revolves around a radio station that was not supposed to be detected and an Airbnb apartment ‘The Love,’ run by the artist’s friend in their hometown. Between 1969 and 1981, a Malaysian communist underground radio in exile Voice of the Malayan Revolution resided in what is now soon to be a resort. Projected on a holographic screen producing shadowy afterimages, the work flickers between radio static, bursts of archival jingles, ruins of the radio station and choreographed scenes of the Airbnb apartment decorated in imagined ‘Southeast Asian’ style.
Song of a Dying Summer 逝く夏の歌 (2022, 71 mins, color, S8mm film transferred to video)
Natsu, together with his best friends, is trying to put on a stage play to commemorate their last summer together. Shot on Super 8mm film, Kohei Sengen's feature-length debut, with its grainy images steeped in muted colors, creates an almost dreamlike atmosphere, conveying the melancholy of growing up and growing apart.
About the Artists
Peng Zuqiang 彭祖强 (b. 1992, Changsha) works with film, video and installations, with an attention to the affective qualities within histories, bodies, and language. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Cell Project Space, E-Flux screening room, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Times Museum, UCCA Beijing, 25FPS, IDFA, Antimatter, and Open City Doc Festival. A resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, he lives and works in Amsterdam.
Kohei Sengen 仙元浩平 (b. 1972, Tokyo) After graduating from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University in 1995, he has been making independent films mainly with 8mm film. His main theme is the impermanence of youth. He is also an organizer of a small group of independent filmmakers called The Seventh Poetry Society. His recent films include And Thus, They're Back on the Spaceship and No One Can Draw My Picture.
About the Curator:
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity starts from a life event, an anomaly in language or in the material world. It continues by employing methods drawn from both Eastern and Western practices and philosophies. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies.
She is a lecturer at CalArts, teaching experimental film. She is co-curator of Move Screen, Process Cinema, the founder of Experimentalist Media Collective, the editor of B-Journal, and serves as a programmer for the Experimental session of Slamdance Film Festival.