Focus #1 | Festival VIDEOFORMES

Focus – Thursday 12 march – 2pm

Hyperwave

Hyper Wave, founded in 2022, is a Taiwan-based international art collective bringing together Hung Yu-Hao, Chiu Chieh-Sen, Lin Szu-Ying, Margot Guillemot, and curator Lai Pei-Chun. Through a structured research approach to local history, culture, and memory, we engage with regional human and environmental landscapes, reconstructing situated narratives and connecting them to an open network of exchange. As a cultural actor, Hyper Wave also runs two spaces: Surfy Space in Yilan (an artist residency and production site) and the Zhongshan Institute of Techno-Art in Taipei (exhibitions, salons, and interdisciplinary encounters), bridging rural and urban contexts, creation and presentation, and local and international communities.

This programme brings together five works by Taiwanese artists and sets out a gradual trajectory: starting from an identifiable reality and slowly slipping into mystery and the unreal. As the videos unfold, landscape stops being mere backdrop and becomes a zone of disturbance—where memory reshapes, where rituals open passages, and where the non-human seeps in. At first a witness, the viewer is gradually drawn into a world whose landmarks grow increasingly uncertain.

Act I is rooted in recognizable scenes while introducing a sense of distance. Ting-Wen CHAN plants this instability through a moving landscape in which perception begins to fracture. Hung Yu Hao then crosses a threshold: a nocturnal procession becomes a temporal corridor, layered with spectres and urban strata. Pei-chi KUO concludes the act by tipping military and family history into an ambiguous drift, suspended between fascination and unease.

Act II leaves observation behind to enter invisible forces. I-Chun CHEN summons the mountain as a territory of apparitions and belief, where fear, power, and entities blur into one another. Finally, Xu-Zhan ZHANG pushes reality into fable: termites gnaw through cables, infrastructure feels almost alive, and modernity reveals its fragility. Together, these works trace a passage from the tangible to the indeterminate—until the viewer becomes witness to what wavers, or to what haunts the land.

FOCUS SCREENING

Moving Landscape 1 | Ting-Wen CHAN | 2025 | 1’18

The work by Ting-Wen CHAN originates from her curiosity about the view from a train window: why the human eye can perceive a clear landscape while a phone camera captures only a blurred image, and why a stationary landscape appears to be moving.

To explore this reversal between motion and stillness in vision, the artist designed five experiments. She first used a slow shutter speed and moved the camera to create motion blur, then printed the resulting image onto a large flag and placed it back on site. A runner carried the flag across the frame, and the scene was recorded using high-speed filming to slow the movement down. Through this process, the landscape, the flag, and the red track blended into one another, while the static background and the dynamic flag exchanged roles, causing the relationship between motion and stillness to appear in constant flux.

Drift II | Hung Yu Hao | 2019 | 5’00

Wanhua, one of the oldest districts in Taipei, Taiwan, retains traces of its historic dockside culture, where the emotional flows of aging urban neighborhoods continue to resurface. The Qingshan King Night Patrol is an annual ritual festival in Wanhua that has been passed down for centuries and remains actively practiced today. Procession troupes move through narrow alleyways day and night, weaving together the district’s cultural imagery and collective memory.

Everyday streets become sites of shared belief, carrying layers of faith and past street memories. Through 3D scanning, the festival is momentarily frozen in time, allowing inherited traditions and contemporary urban scenes to overlap within a shared temporal corridor. This convergence evokes spectral presences of the street—returning year after year, tracing the present while reflecting on the past and gesturing toward possible futures.

Pink Warship I | Pei-chi KUO | 2023 | 9’21

The Pink Warship series by Pei-chi KUO is a cross-temporal image-making project that combines her personal family memories with AI technology. The first work, Pink Warship / (2023), is based on the story of her father, who was sent on a military mission to the United States for shipboard training when she was three years old.

The artist blends her faint yet enduring childhood memories with military realities, transforming them into a phantasmagorical sea voyage composed of more than 130 AI-generated short clips. The work recounts the birth of the Pink Warship, as demanded by World War II, and its journey to Taiwan. Its pink palette softens the rigidity of military symbols, allowing a sense of contradiction to emerge.

Hunter, Mountain, and Mo-shin-a | I-Chun CHEN | 2023 | 5’00

This work begins with a haunting question: Why does the hunter, even deep in the mountains, eventually lay down his gun? It is a question that touches not only on the relationship between humans and nature, but also on the fragile boundary between power, belief, and fear. Drawing from the artist’s childhood experiences in Taiwan’s highland villages—where tales of spirits and mysterious beings known as mo-shin-a permeated everyday life—the piece employs AI-generated imagery and digital collage to summon the spectral presence of these forest phantoms.

Termite Feeding Show | Xu-Zhan ZHANG | 2025 | 15’00

Climate crisis, energy disasters, the fantasy of the Anthropocene, and a sci-fi fable of insect diets inspired by a real news story: “Termites chewing through power cables causing major blackouts in mountainous cities.”

To adapt to sudden ecological changes brought about by climate change, “termites” have shifted their dietary habits, turning their attention to artificial cables as a new food source. In the damp, shadowy ant tunnels, insect restaurants feature musicians playing cooking melodies while butchers handle the food (meat portions), showcasing their culinary skills with cable-based dishes.