Linda Chiu-han Lai

Linda Chiu-han Lai

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Most Known for...

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Doors Medley 2014

A game of montage art, Doors Medley is a re-mix of two existing work of mine – Door Game (2005, 26m) and Door Games Window Frames (2012, 11m30s), which explores visual mannerisms and formulaic structures of film melodrama of the 1960s in Hong Kong. Doors Medley highlights specifically gender paradigms embedded in popular culture. From anthropology’s viewpoint, we have created drama and we also reenacted the drama we create. Popular cultural texts fine-tune specific course of events with narrative logic, which we fervently imitate to act out our daily roles. Isolated narrative fragments, as they are subject to free combination, reveal their hidden predispositions.
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I Told Them My Camera Was On 2005

The video is a narrative game reconstructing Lai's own video diaries (1990-2003) and found footage. It plays with the thin line between remembering and fabricating, recording and staging, documentary and story... It shows 13 women's stories as a network of acquaintances, each in an isolated moment of her life. Questions on the practice of auto-ethnography are raised via "the politics of the everyday."
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Door Game 2005

Door Game is a narrative game playing with the found footage of a number of family ethics melodramas from HK Cantonese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. By re-assembling loose fragments into some kind of coherent structures, I reveal the hidden logic of the genre, exposing the repetitive elements. Through story-creation, my critique of the gender-biased, formulaic quality inherent to Cantonese melodramas evolves. I want to expose the arbitrariness of pathos and ethos in the Cantonese melodramatic tradition, especially to point out how narrative logic turns open options into moral necessity, and how a particular form of morality is turned into absolute truth via plotting… - http://www.lindalai-floatingsite.com/content/video/data/published/doorgame/index.html