Islands 島嶼
Taiwan / UK moving image festival, August 2021
My film Inner Sage / Outer King was featured in the festival Islands / 島嶼 curated by Wen Hsu and Peter Treherne. Islands, a Taiwan / UK moving image festival, takes place in August via newsletter. Every week a programme of films and letters will be emailed straight to audiences in the UK and Taiwan.
Inner Sage / Outer King was featured in the programme Transmissions / 標定基地 that considers “islands as transmitters. For millennia, navigators have used the way islands affect winds, waves and currents to orient themselves in the vastnesses of oceans.” alongside work and letters with Edwin Rostron and 許鈞宜/ Hsu Chun Yi.
Dear George,
When he stares off into the distance at the steam fog coming from the coast on a winter day, is he aware of the impossibility of a closure, of something eternally unresolved?
They stroll among tombstones of varied sizes and shapes all day long. A considerable number of cigarettes are lit and put out. Photos are taken in a leisurely manner for them to kill some time.
Fictional or fabricated—this is likely one of the few methods with which we are able to identify the past: we hold strips of celluloid film against a light source and look at the lined-up frames. Everything we see in these frames is vague, undetermined, as if their names were lost. We can only try to point at it with our fingers. I picked up the roll of celluloid film on that humid hot summer afternoon. In its negative images, I saw the sea as a vast desolate land; on the surface of the film, I saw dust particles as remote celestial objects. Images, at this moment, became the most incomprehensible and the most ungraspable thing for us. Viewing what I have not experienced is comparable to reading someone else’s diary in a language foreign to me—like staggering clumsily along the illusion-like coastal line in Raúl Ruiz’s films.
A possible ending might be there for this unfinished film: during the time when the shooting schedule is paused, they lean on the rocks, sitting like that couple on the beach in front of the camera. Every person, whether knowingly or not, purposefully or not, is turned into images and becomes part of the past.
Hsu Chun Yi
Dear George,
當他遠眺著沿海襲來的冬日水氣，是否正感到完結的不可能、一種永久的懸宕？
他們終日在大小不一的墓碑間徘徊，並且燃去不少香菸、隨意地拍照來揮霍時間。虛構或杜撰，這似乎是我們能夠指認過去的少數方法，拿起底片朝向光源、抬頭看著那些並列的影格，其中一切仍是那麼模糊不定、彷彿失去名字那般，只能用手去指著。我在那悶熱的午後拾起那卷底片，將反白的海面看作空曠的荒地、把沈積在膠片上的塵埃認為遙遠的星體。此時，影像彷彿成為我們最不可能掌握之物，看著那些我未曾經歷的，就像是以非我所熟悉的語言讀著他人的日記，如同蹣跚走過盧伊茲的電影裡那些幻覺般的海岸線。
在這未完成的電影裡，可能存在這樣一個可能的結尾：在拍攝暫停的時間裡，他們倚坐在岩石上、像是那對海灘上的情侶般站立於相機前，所有人都在不經意的情況下，成為了影像與過去。
許鈞宜
The brochure for Islands contains all the correspondences between British and Taiwanese artists with translations can be found below