Chris Chong Chan Fui
Directing
Biography
CHRIS CHONG CHAN FUI is a filmmaker and artist who works between Southeast Asia and Canada. From digital and analog moving images to fabricated and organic objects, Chong works to reveal unfamiliar narratives. His work layers the social and natural sciences with transnational circuits of globalization and manufactured cultures and landscapes. With a rigorous research methodology and a formalist aesthetic, he uses structure and constraints as a creative path toward expressive innovation. Chong has exhibited at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and the Gwangju Biennale, while premiering films at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors’ Fortnight, BFI London, and TIFF’s Wavelengths, where he won back-to-back awards for Best Canadian Short Film. He is a Smithsonian Institute fellow (National Museum of Natural History), a Ford Foundation fellow, and a Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Arts Fellow. Chong holds an MFA (film) from York University and is the Assistant Professor (film) at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
Known For
Karaoke juxtaposes a young man's idealism with the reality of a changing Malaysia through karaoke videos.
Karaoke
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.
Block B
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.
PARADE PROTEST
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.
Minus
"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
Music Might Have Deceived Us
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.
Pool
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.
Camera Trap
A claymation skater-boy love story that swings.