Ming-Yuen S. Ma

Slanted Vision is an energetic experimental video with eroticized images of Asian men that explores the relation between vision and desire. Working in collaboration with a diverse group of artists, writers, performers and musicians, many of them queer and Asian, Los Angeles-based media artist Ming-Yuen S. Ma has created a promiscuous montage inspired by gay porn videos, kung fu movies and TV cooking shows.

The film utilizes the story-telling format to create a multilevel narrative that explores the relations between speech, language, and desire. Addresses issues of sexuality, subjectivity, tradition, and identity in gay Asian contexts.

In a stark white room, a naked man is crawling in a circle on an unmade bed. He is trying to remember the men he had sex with on the bed by searching for their smells. A fragmentary account of his encounters is layered within a dense electronic soundscape of whispering voices, evoking a sense of whispering voices, evoking a sense of memory and loss and the fear of death.

Re-framing the media representation of the Los Angeles rebellion and contextualizing its significance by locating it historically and politically in a timeline with the pro-Democracy demonstrations in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the AIDS activist movement in the U.S.

The issue of coming out to your family is not so easy to many of us, especially if you are from a traditional culture where you don't even have the right translation for "gay". What are the consequences of coming out to your family and friends? This is a documentary of 21 individuals sharing their own experiences.

What is the relationship between Asian drag queens and muscle boys at the Mr. and Ms. GAPA 1991 competition and Chinese poetry written during the Tang dynasty? Why is it that Thara Saikaku's passages from "The Great Mirror of Male Love" describing the clothing of Kabuki boy actors seems so fitting for drag divas on the runway? What is the significance when contemporary Asian gay men dress up in costumes that seem more out of Hollywood than Beijing? How do you say An Ling, Mizi Hia or Sodeoka? Is this deconstruction, appropriation, or just over-kill?

A young filmmaker/poet thrills the audience with romantic and profound images of gay youth.