Lesley Loksi Chan

A lonely young woman is selected as a finalist in an international competition to send four civilians to Mars, forever.

In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.

A woman returns to the home where she lived as a pregnant teenager. Told through text, found objects, found footage and assemblage sculpture, this work questions and challenges conventional images and narratives of “teen pregnancy” and reflects on contemporary experiences of self-representation and ways of remembering.

Imprinting on the archival photographs of Frank S. Matsura, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Okanogan County, Washington, in 1903, Chan constructs a lyrical, experimental documentary that flits between fact and fabrication. While Matsura worked as a kitchen helper during the day and developed his negatives in the same kitchen’s sinks at night, in the present day, a young woman gazes upon Matsura’s centuried images, reflecting on the disappearance of someone in her own life, her longing for escape, and sights that cannot be documented. While making this work, Chan hand-processed film but mistakenly scrunched it into a ball in her bag while going about her day. The accidental effect, catalyzed by rhythms of the quotidian, is scratched, sonorous, inky blue in hue.

In this coming-of-age tale, adolescent Miles narrates his memories of his single mother, Wanda, an eye patch–wearing, former sex worker. Both mother and child are a nomadic unit, regularly relocating their home base with stuffed suitcases in hand. Paired with the invisible handiwork of stop-motion animation, Chan visually choreographs her characters in artful tableaux, intimating both depth and distance in Miles’ filial bond with Wanda. Marrying an endearing voiceover with elegantly lit and intricately stylized visual compositions, Chan’s tender, parental ode employs hand-constructed dollhouses and hand gestures to illustrate the migratory tethers of memory and family.