Known for Acting
In the mist room, in the dim light, the steaming heat is floating and overflowing. The flickering male bodies, sucking each other's desire and loneliness, the more squeezed, the thirsty. You seem to have entered the forbidden area by mistake in formal attire, falling between dream and waking, staring, and being stared at. You can't remember how you came here or how to get out. Theater and video director Zhou Dongyan once again touched the life experience of gay men’s community culture that is hard to articulate but difficult to cut. This time, he moved the poetic lens language into VR, taking you and me to the male sauna, peeling off the layered desires, and exploring the hidden love in some kind of lovelessness.
In the early 1980s, hundreds of the so-called female revenging/exploitation films were produced in Taiwan. The 2020 version was based on the old genre to recreate a fantasy of the bloody revenge. The film is one of Su Hui-Yu’s “Re-shooting” series, which re-visits historical sources in Taiwan during the old days around the 1970s-1980s while the country was under martial law governance.
In artist Su Hui-yu’s signature style, a moody slow-motion pan captures a wild, glitter-scattered, blood-splattered orgy during the Tang dynasty. The film is an invocation of scenes from 1985 Taiwanese cult film Tang Chao Chi Li that only existed in the screenplay, unfilmed until now due to what can only be imagined as budgetary restrictions and censorship pressures during the Martial Law era. Presented without narrative context, the orgiastic murder scene plays out like an unsettling nightmare.
Ocean, a boy who was born and raised on a small island, has a taboo relationship with Tide, a sailor whose ship regularly docks at the harbor.
A VIDEO ART WORK IN FIVE CHAPTERS. 1. Six young men walk into a forest in Taiwan, making close contact with ferns. They establish emotional and physical relationships with the plants, relying on their bodies rather than words. Ferns are very common in Taiwan. They are valued by indigenous people but not by Japanese colonists or the Nationalists. 2. A man makes love to a bird's nest fern and then starts eating it. Zheng reflects on our current moral outlook that it is “natural” to eat plants but “unnatural” to make love to them. Bird's nest fern is a popular delicacy in Taiwan. 3. Zheng collaborates with three local BDSM practitioners who in turn collaborate with three fern species to expand BDSM practice. 4. For centuries humans have been in love with furled fronds of young ferns. Inspired by Yaoi anime, this chapter follows a young couple in their acts of love with fiddleheads. 5. This chapter connects spores and sperms.
