Yanbin Zhao

Next Life tells the story of a Tibetan family seeking moments of “temporary happiness” while living in exile in suburban America. As their father suffers from a mysterious inner pain, they turn to Buddhist medicine and spiritual teachings on death and rebirth, embracing the Tibetan concept of "Tse Chema" (reincarnation).

A nightmare fueled with crude oil.

An intimate portrayal of love that penetrates through the wounds of language. Chinese and Korean written down on mirrors, broken apart and reattached together. In the spinning and oscillating, words collapse into sculptures, meanings transcended by whispers, like a spell casted through the gesture of telling a secret.

Being trapped in the United States and self-isolated, I had a video chat with my family in China. Back in January, I shot a roll of film recording the sunset at Santa Monica beach, and rewatching it now, I decided to prolong the dusk as an attempt to erase the decisive boundary which separates night and day.

Surrounding a hidden monument honoring Chinese migrant workers, alongside a railroad located in Canyon Country, California, Train Song uses reflective material to distort the image of the railroad as an approach to conjuring the unseen spirits of the seemingly tranquil landscape. calling for remembrance of Chinese-American works through a meditative audiovisual experience. (16mm – Black and White – 3'30”)

Inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, OM is a quasi visual diary retracing the quarantine experience of a Chinese stranded in California during the peak of the pandemic. Traveling between mutated domestic space and contaminated nature, the film explores the rupture in both the personal and the political, as well as meditates upon senses of displacement, paranoia, alienation, and collective trauma.