For this month's Cinematheque event as part of the Carnegie International exhibition, the Carnegie Museum of Art will present three short films on November 10, including Ana Hjort Guttu and Daisuke Kosugi's The Lost Dreams of Naoki Hayakawa and Wu Tsang's Duilian.
Guttu provides a synopsis of the former:
Art director Naoki Hayakawa works 16 hours daily in a creative, neo-totalitarian advertisement company in Tokyo. The working pressure causes a mental condition between sleep and wakefulness where he has strange and wonderful dreams.
And ArtAsiaPacific summarizes the latter:
Duilian (2016), the aftermath of artist-filmmaker Wu Tsang’s six-month residency at Hong Kong contemporary art platform Spring Workshop, is simultaneously theatrical and intimate. Dim lighting and lush, floor-length velvet curtains invite a reverential hush, prepping viewers for the surreal 27-minute film revolving around legendary Qing Dynasty-era female revolutionary Qiu Jin (1875–1907). The revered mystique surrounding this historical hero from the East is amplified by the fact that Qiu was a woman; transgender artist Wu Tsang plays on this idea, literally and metaphorically, achieving uncannily enthralling results. While the film has been accused by some of orientalization and speculative queering of the ‘other’, Tsang’s defense for Duilian might be that it does so consciously and unapologetically.The event starts at 5:00 pm.
