Jiaying Sim | University of Glasgow (original) (raw)
Journal Articles by Jiaying Sim
Film-Philosophy, 2023
Using Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address i... more Using Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address is encouraged when one attends to the ways in which on-screen cinematic audiovisual spectacles are produced through the interaction of different bodies on-screen. Affective cinematic encounters open up other ways of understanding the female body as productive assemblages of everyday affective interactions and relationalities with other bodies within material culture. Particularly, I demonstrate an affective mode of address that attends to the interaction of cinematic objects and how they are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen, to reveal hidden dynamics to characters' relationship and overarching narratives off-screen.
Journal of Chinese Film Studies
This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamilia... more This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemb...
International Journal of Diaspora & Cultural Criticism, 2020
This paper argues that in Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's feature film, A Land Imagined (2019... more This paper argues that in Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's feature film, A Land Imagined (2019), liminal states of in-betweenness and blurred subjectivities in the film embody and uncover the precarious positions that transnational migrant workers occupy in Singapore. I posit that the only way to "find" the missing construction worker from China who disappears suddenly from a land reclamation site early in the film is to traverse and transgress spaces as defined by physical, national, psychological, real and/or technological boundaries. It is only through the act of tracing and attending to transsensorial states of trance presented in and produced within and without the film can the disembodied "ghost" of the missing migrant worker be returned to his body and hence the materiality of the film. The audience is compelled to ethically examine the strong presence of transmigrant labour that is forced to pass as invisible or absent in nation-state Singapore.
While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have alter... more While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have altered and continued to affect audience's cinematic experiences, the question is not so much how technology has increased possibility of a sensory response to cinema. Rather it is one that exposes how much technological changes only underscore the participation of our senses and the body in one's experience of watching film, highlighting the inherently sensorial nature of the cinematic experience. This paper aims to address the above question through an olfactory cinema, by close analysis of "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (2006) by Tom Tykwer. What is n olfactory cinema, and how can such an approach better our understanding of sensorial aspects found within a cinema that ostensibly favours audio-visual senses? What can we benefit from an olfactory cinema? Perhaps, it is through an olfactory cinema that one may begin to embrace the sensual quality of cinema that has been overshadowed by the naturalized ways of experiencing films solely with our eyes and ears, so much so that we desensitize ourselves to the role our senses play in cinematic experiences altogether.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2014
While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have alter... more While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have altered and continued to affect audience’s cinematic experiences, the question is not so much how technology has increased possibility of a sensory response to cinema, rather, it is one that exposes how such technological changes only underscore the participation of our senses and the body in one’s experience of watching fi lm, highlighting the inherently sensorial nature of the cinematic experience. This paper aims to address the above question through an olfactory cinema, by close analysis of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) by Tom Tykwer. What is an olfactory cinema, and how can such an approach better our understanding of sensorial aspects found within a cinema that ostensibly favours audio-visual senses? What can we benefit from an olfactory cinema? Perhaps, it is through an olfactory cinema that one may begin to embrace the sensual quality of cinema that has been overshadowed by the naturalized ways of experiencing fi lms solely with our eyes and ears, so much so that we desensitize ourselves to the role our senses play in cinematic experiences altogether.
Book Chapters by Jiaying Sim
Contemporary Screen Ethics (Absences, Identities, Belonding, Looking Anew) Eds. Lucy Bolton, David Martin-Jones, Robert Sinnerbrink, 2023
[TW: Sexual and gendered violence] This chapter examines cinema’s potential to ethically regard ... more [TW: Sexual and gendered violence]
This chapter examines cinema’s potential to ethically regard sexual and gendered violence and film aesthetics’ capacity to screen rape culture without subjecting women to essentialised visual modes of subjugation, or similar sexual violence, in the context of Asia’s media and film industries. It explores Nina Wu (2019), a psychological thriller about an aspiring Taiwanese young actress, Nina Wu, who moves to Taipei from her rural hometown. After juggling insignificant media odd jobs for eight years, Nina finally gets an opportunity to audition for a lead role in a 1960s spy romance thriller, Spy Romance. To her dismay, Nina learns that this role requires her to get naked in a risqué sex scene. Whilst she lands the part, the audience eventually learns that the film’s executive producer, Fat Cat, drugged and raped Nina during her audition. A film about making a film, Nina Wu interrogates the circumstantial contexts, psychological aftermaths and other consequences that enable sexual and gendered violence against women within Taiwan’s media and film industry. Initially the chapter considers Nina Wu film in relation to the #MeToo movement and the specificities of its Taiwanese context, establishing in the process how the film’s engagement with rape culture relates to ongoing debates concerning cinema, ethics, the gaze and affect. For the remainder of the chapter the film is analysed in terms of its aesthetic features (especially its shot composition, mise-en-scène and cinematography, self-reflexive storytelling, and the tracking shot), drawing out thereby both Nina Wu’s illumination of how rape culture is enabled in the Taiwanese film and media industry and as a consequence, the insights this particular film offers concerning the correlation between screen ethics and cinematic affect.
Transnational Crime Cinema, 2022
This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which ser... more This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which serves as a case study for the trauma of loss that is inadvertently tied to the reconstruction and re-narrativising of filmmaking processes. The premise of the documentary is self-referential: In 1992, a group of three 18 year old Singaporean girls (Jasmine Ng, Sophie Siddique, and Sandi Tan herself) banded together to write, fund, and produce an independent road-movie of the same name (Shirkers) about a teenage killer, only to have the 70 rolls of film stolen by their teacher/original Shirkers director George Cardona. 20 years later, the original film reels resurface in near pristine condition when Cardona’s widow returns them to Tan. Shirkers revolves around the original Shirkers--lost and found--where found footages are interspersed with in-depth interviews of the three female filmmakers and other key privy to the filmmaking process of original Shirkers. By bringing the women working behind the scenes to the foreground, Shirker’s meta-fictional and intermedial characteristics produce a film within a film, a film about making a film, that emphasises how collaborative “sense-making” produces affective screen experiences. This paper focuses on the role of women in Shirkers and how their involvement and participation in the cinematic process compel the audience to look beyond their initial fixation with what the original Shirker’s film is about to regard the transnational sensoria produced through the documentary Shirkers as the screen experience traverses time, place and cinematic form.
Queer Southeast Asia, 2022
Nearly a decade ago, Kenneth Chan traced a brief genealogy of queer Singapore cinema culture in h... more Nearly a decade ago, Kenneth Chan traced a brief genealogy of queer Singapore cinema culture in his essay “Impossible Presence: Toward a Queer Singapore Cinema, 1990s–2000s” (2012). Despite the lack of state-funding and limiting Films Acts on film exhibition and production, alternative voices of queer sexualities exist on screen between the interstices of mainstream Singapore cinema. Filmmakers work around state restrictions by presenting their works at international film festival circuits, or through integrating queerness into heteronormative modes of cinematic narratives and styles. Following Chan, this paper agrees with cinema’s ontological ability to cultivate queer spaces of expressions but rearticulates this potential with an attention to new digital landscapes that expand cinematic circuits beyond traditional theatrical releases to include video-on-demand and subscription-on-demand platforms and other video streaming sites. Today, cinematic industries reflect Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture (2006) where online distribution, consumption, and discussion of films create new media landscapes of collaborative sense-making. Using Viddsee as my case study, I argue that the online video streaming site founded in 2013, which features curated Southeast Asian short film format, functions as an assemblage of spatial, temporal, and corporeal intersections that enables queer filmic praxis to grow alongside dominant discourse surrounding mainstream national cinema. Analysing “Purple Light”, a short film by Javior Chew, Cecilia Ang, and Charlene Yiu, both in terms of textual and institutional significances, I trace the affective structures evoked that redefine relationships between audience and screen, individual and community, which enable queer cultural artefacts to thrive rather than disguise.
Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics (2014), Jul 31, 2014
This chapter situates Wong Kar-wai’s “The Hand” in its transnational context through its relation... more This chapter situates Wong Kar-wai’s “The Hand” in its transnational context through its relation to the American and Italian segments of the anthology film Eros (2004). The fact that “The Hand” was meant to appeal to an international audience highlights the importance of considering the roles of “modes of spectator address” and reception when considering conceptualizations of transnational cinema. In discussing these conceptualizations, chapter will engage in an examination of the cinematic address and film style of “The Hand” to suggest we reconsider the eros and embodiment of Eros in terms of more complex understandings of desire and corporeality. In the end, this reconsideration allows for a rethinking of “transnational cinema” beyond simple categories of geography, signification, and representation.
Book Reviews by Jiaying Sim
Sage Journals: Cultural Geographies, 2021
Book review: Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits
SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, 2019
What is the relationship between cultural policies and the state of the arts in Singapore? The St... more What is the relationship between cultural policies and the state of the arts in Singapore? The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions, a volume of essays edited by Terence Chong, answers this question through contributions from scholars, theorists, art administrators, critics, practitioners and journalists familiar with the cultural and arts sectors of Singapore.
Reports by Jiaying Sim
Other Professional Activity by Jiaying Sim
Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body ... more Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body Studies across disciplines, institutions, and media. It is a forum promoting the discussion of research and practices through articles, reviews, interviews, and notes investigating various aspects of embodiment on screen(s). The journal considers studies of moving and still images, such as cinema, television, the Internet, digital photography, portable and personal devices, and medical and surveillance imaging. The journal considers studies of the portrayal, function, and perception of the body, such as gender and sexuality studies, feminism and masculinity studies, trans* studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cyborg studies, and dis/ability studies.
Papers by Jiaying Sim
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 12, 2022
This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which ser... more This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which serves as a case study for the trauma of loss that is inadvertently tied to the reconstruction and re-narrativising of filmmaking processes. The premise of the documentary is self-referential: In 1992, a group of three 18 year old Singaporean girls (Jasmine Ng, Sophie Siddique, and Sandi Tan herself) banded together to write, fund, and produce an independent road-movie of the same name (Shirkers) about a teenage killer, only to have the 70 rolls of film stolen by their teacher/original Shirkers director George Cardona. 20 years later, the original film reels resurface in near pristine condition when Cardona’s widow returns them to Tan. Shirkers revolves around the original Shirkers--lost and found--where found footages are interspersed with in-depth interviews of the three female filmmakers and other key privy to the filmmaking process of original Shirkers. By bringing the women working behind the scenes to the foreground, Shirker’s meta-fictional and intermedial characteristics produce a film within a film, a film about making a film, that emphasises how collaborative “sense-making” produces affective screen experiences. This paper focuses on the role of women in Shirkers and how their involvement and participation in the cinematic process compel the audience to look beyond their initial fixation with what the original Shirker’s film is about to regard the transnational sensoria produced through the documentary Shirkers as the screen experience traverses time, place and cinematic form.
Screen bodies, Mar 1, 2016
As part of the 2014 GENERATION project celebrating the past twenty-five years of contemporary art... more As part of the 2014 GENERATION project celebrating the past twenty-five years of contemporary art in Scotland, Douglas Gordon’s exhibition, “Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now,” took centerstage at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. Gordon contributed to the dialogue with a unique installation showcasing his twenty-two years of artistic endeavors through 101 different-sized old television sets elevated on old plastic beer crates, simultaneously screening 82 video and film works. The screens flickered and lit the dark main gallery as the visual works played on loop—some with sound, some without, some in slow motion. The exhibition included such works as 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), Play Dead; Real Time (2003), Henry Rebel (2011), Silence, Exile, Deceit: An Industrial Pantomime (2013) and emphasized how Gordon’s collection has grown since its first exhibition from 1999 in Poland and will continue to do so, as he updates the videos and films.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
Film-Philosophy
Using Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address i... more Using Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address is encouraged when one attends to the ways in which on-screen cinematic audio-visual spectacles are produced through the interaction of different bodies on-screen. Affective cinematic encounters open up other ways of understanding the female body as productive assemblages of everyday affective interactions and relationalities with other bodies within material culture. Particularly, I demonstrate an affective mode of address that attends to the interaction of cinematic objects and how they are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen to reveal hidden dynamics to characters’ relationship and overarching narratives off-screen.
International Journal of Diaspora&Cultural Criticism, 2020
Film-Philosophy, 2023
Using Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address i... more Using Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address is encouraged when one attends to the ways in which on-screen cinematic audiovisual spectacles are produced through the interaction of different bodies on-screen. Affective cinematic encounters open up other ways of understanding the female body as productive assemblages of everyday affective interactions and relationalities with other bodies within material culture. Particularly, I demonstrate an affective mode of address that attends to the interaction of cinematic objects and how they are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen, to reveal hidden dynamics to characters' relationship and overarching narratives off-screen.
Journal of Chinese Film Studies
This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamilia... more This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemb...
International Journal of Diaspora & Cultural Criticism, 2020
This paper argues that in Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's feature film, A Land Imagined (2019... more This paper argues that in Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's feature film, A Land Imagined (2019), liminal states of in-betweenness and blurred subjectivities in the film embody and uncover the precarious positions that transnational migrant workers occupy in Singapore. I posit that the only way to "find" the missing construction worker from China who disappears suddenly from a land reclamation site early in the film is to traverse and transgress spaces as defined by physical, national, psychological, real and/or technological boundaries. It is only through the act of tracing and attending to transsensorial states of trance presented in and produced within and without the film can the disembodied "ghost" of the missing migrant worker be returned to his body and hence the materiality of the film. The audience is compelled to ethically examine the strong presence of transmigrant labour that is forced to pass as invisible or absent in nation-state Singapore.
While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have alter... more While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have altered and continued to affect audience's cinematic experiences, the question is not so much how technology has increased possibility of a sensory response to cinema. Rather it is one that exposes how much technological changes only underscore the participation of our senses and the body in one's experience of watching film, highlighting the inherently sensorial nature of the cinematic experience. This paper aims to address the above question through an olfactory cinema, by close analysis of "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (2006) by Tom Tykwer. What is n olfactory cinema, and how can such an approach better our understanding of sensorial aspects found within a cinema that ostensibly favours audio-visual senses? What can we benefit from an olfactory cinema? Perhaps, it is through an olfactory cinema that one may begin to embrace the sensual quality of cinema that has been overshadowed by the naturalized ways of experiencing films solely with our eyes and ears, so much so that we desensitize ourselves to the role our senses play in cinematic experiences altogether.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2014
While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have alter... more While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have altered and continued to affect audience’s cinematic experiences, the question is not so much how technology has increased possibility of a sensory response to cinema, rather, it is one that exposes how such technological changes only underscore the participation of our senses and the body in one’s experience of watching fi lm, highlighting the inherently sensorial nature of the cinematic experience. This paper aims to address the above question through an olfactory cinema, by close analysis of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) by Tom Tykwer. What is an olfactory cinema, and how can such an approach better our understanding of sensorial aspects found within a cinema that ostensibly favours audio-visual senses? What can we benefit from an olfactory cinema? Perhaps, it is through an olfactory cinema that one may begin to embrace the sensual quality of cinema that has been overshadowed by the naturalized ways of experiencing fi lms solely with our eyes and ears, so much so that we desensitize ourselves to the role our senses play in cinematic experiences altogether.
Contemporary Screen Ethics (Absences, Identities, Belonding, Looking Anew) Eds. Lucy Bolton, David Martin-Jones, Robert Sinnerbrink, 2023
[TW: Sexual and gendered violence] This chapter examines cinema’s potential to ethically regard ... more [TW: Sexual and gendered violence]
This chapter examines cinema’s potential to ethically regard sexual and gendered violence and film aesthetics’ capacity to screen rape culture without subjecting women to essentialised visual modes of subjugation, or similar sexual violence, in the context of Asia’s media and film industries. It explores Nina Wu (2019), a psychological thriller about an aspiring Taiwanese young actress, Nina Wu, who moves to Taipei from her rural hometown. After juggling insignificant media odd jobs for eight years, Nina finally gets an opportunity to audition for a lead role in a 1960s spy romance thriller, Spy Romance. To her dismay, Nina learns that this role requires her to get naked in a risqué sex scene. Whilst she lands the part, the audience eventually learns that the film’s executive producer, Fat Cat, drugged and raped Nina during her audition. A film about making a film, Nina Wu interrogates the circumstantial contexts, psychological aftermaths and other consequences that enable sexual and gendered violence against women within Taiwan’s media and film industry. Initially the chapter considers Nina Wu film in relation to the #MeToo movement and the specificities of its Taiwanese context, establishing in the process how the film’s engagement with rape culture relates to ongoing debates concerning cinema, ethics, the gaze and affect. For the remainder of the chapter the film is analysed in terms of its aesthetic features (especially its shot composition, mise-en-scène and cinematography, self-reflexive storytelling, and the tracking shot), drawing out thereby both Nina Wu’s illumination of how rape culture is enabled in the Taiwanese film and media industry and as a consequence, the insights this particular film offers concerning the correlation between screen ethics and cinematic affect.
Transnational Crime Cinema, 2022
This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which ser... more This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which serves as a case study for the trauma of loss that is inadvertently tied to the reconstruction and re-narrativising of filmmaking processes. The premise of the documentary is self-referential: In 1992, a group of three 18 year old Singaporean girls (Jasmine Ng, Sophie Siddique, and Sandi Tan herself) banded together to write, fund, and produce an independent road-movie of the same name (Shirkers) about a teenage killer, only to have the 70 rolls of film stolen by their teacher/original Shirkers director George Cardona. 20 years later, the original film reels resurface in near pristine condition when Cardona’s widow returns them to Tan. Shirkers revolves around the original Shirkers--lost and found--where found footages are interspersed with in-depth interviews of the three female filmmakers and other key privy to the filmmaking process of original Shirkers. By bringing the women working behind the scenes to the foreground, Shirker’s meta-fictional and intermedial characteristics produce a film within a film, a film about making a film, that emphasises how collaborative “sense-making” produces affective screen experiences. This paper focuses on the role of women in Shirkers and how their involvement and participation in the cinematic process compel the audience to look beyond their initial fixation with what the original Shirker’s film is about to regard the transnational sensoria produced through the documentary Shirkers as the screen experience traverses time, place and cinematic form.
Queer Southeast Asia, 2022
Nearly a decade ago, Kenneth Chan traced a brief genealogy of queer Singapore cinema culture in h... more Nearly a decade ago, Kenneth Chan traced a brief genealogy of queer Singapore cinema culture in his essay “Impossible Presence: Toward a Queer Singapore Cinema, 1990s–2000s” (2012). Despite the lack of state-funding and limiting Films Acts on film exhibition and production, alternative voices of queer sexualities exist on screen between the interstices of mainstream Singapore cinema. Filmmakers work around state restrictions by presenting their works at international film festival circuits, or through integrating queerness into heteronormative modes of cinematic narratives and styles. Following Chan, this paper agrees with cinema’s ontological ability to cultivate queer spaces of expressions but rearticulates this potential with an attention to new digital landscapes that expand cinematic circuits beyond traditional theatrical releases to include video-on-demand and subscription-on-demand platforms and other video streaming sites. Today, cinematic industries reflect Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture (2006) where online distribution, consumption, and discussion of films create new media landscapes of collaborative sense-making. Using Viddsee as my case study, I argue that the online video streaming site founded in 2013, which features curated Southeast Asian short film format, functions as an assemblage of spatial, temporal, and corporeal intersections that enables queer filmic praxis to grow alongside dominant discourse surrounding mainstream national cinema. Analysing “Purple Light”, a short film by Javior Chew, Cecilia Ang, and Charlene Yiu, both in terms of textual and institutional significances, I trace the affective structures evoked that redefine relationships between audience and screen, individual and community, which enable queer cultural artefacts to thrive rather than disguise.
Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics (2014), Jul 31, 2014
This chapter situates Wong Kar-wai’s “The Hand” in its transnational context through its relation... more This chapter situates Wong Kar-wai’s “The Hand” in its transnational context through its relation to the American and Italian segments of the anthology film Eros (2004). The fact that “The Hand” was meant to appeal to an international audience highlights the importance of considering the roles of “modes of spectator address” and reception when considering conceptualizations of transnational cinema. In discussing these conceptualizations, chapter will engage in an examination of the cinematic address and film style of “The Hand” to suggest we reconsider the eros and embodiment of Eros in terms of more complex understandings of desire and corporeality. In the end, this reconsideration allows for a rethinking of “transnational cinema” beyond simple categories of geography, signification, and representation.
Sage Journals: Cultural Geographies, 2021
Book review: Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits
SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, 2019
What is the relationship between cultural policies and the state of the arts in Singapore? The St... more What is the relationship between cultural policies and the state of the arts in Singapore? The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions, a volume of essays edited by Terence Chong, answers this question through contributions from scholars, theorists, art administrators, critics, practitioners and journalists familiar with the cultural and arts sectors of Singapore.
Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body ... more Screen Bodies is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Screen Studies and Body Studies across disciplines, institutions, and media. It is a forum promoting the discussion of research and practices through articles, reviews, interviews, and notes investigating various aspects of embodiment on screen(s). The journal considers studies of moving and still images, such as cinema, television, the Internet, digital photography, portable and personal devices, and medical and surveillance imaging. The journal considers studies of the portrayal, function, and perception of the body, such as gender and sexuality studies, feminism and masculinity studies, trans* studies, queer theory, critical race theory, cyborg studies, and dis/ability studies.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 12, 2022
This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which ser... more This chapter addresses Singaporean director Sandi Tan’s 2015 auto-documentary Shirkers, which serves as a case study for the trauma of loss that is inadvertently tied to the reconstruction and re-narrativising of filmmaking processes. The premise of the documentary is self-referential: In 1992, a group of three 18 year old Singaporean girls (Jasmine Ng, Sophie Siddique, and Sandi Tan herself) banded together to write, fund, and produce an independent road-movie of the same name (Shirkers) about a teenage killer, only to have the 70 rolls of film stolen by their teacher/original Shirkers director George Cardona. 20 years later, the original film reels resurface in near pristine condition when Cardona’s widow returns them to Tan. Shirkers revolves around the original Shirkers--lost and found--where found footages are interspersed with in-depth interviews of the three female filmmakers and other key privy to the filmmaking process of original Shirkers. By bringing the women working behind the scenes to the foreground, Shirker’s meta-fictional and intermedial characteristics produce a film within a film, a film about making a film, that emphasises how collaborative “sense-making” produces affective screen experiences. This paper focuses on the role of women in Shirkers and how their involvement and participation in the cinematic process compel the audience to look beyond their initial fixation with what the original Shirker’s film is about to regard the transnational sensoria produced through the documentary Shirkers as the screen experience traverses time, place and cinematic form.
Screen bodies, Mar 1, 2016
As part of the 2014 GENERATION project celebrating the past twenty-five years of contemporary art... more As part of the 2014 GENERATION project celebrating the past twenty-five years of contemporary art in Scotland, Douglas Gordon’s exhibition, “Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now,” took centerstage at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. Gordon contributed to the dialogue with a unique installation showcasing his twenty-two years of artistic endeavors through 101 different-sized old television sets elevated on old plastic beer crates, simultaneously screening 82 video and film works. The screens flickered and lit the dark main gallery as the visual works played on loop—some with sound, some without, some in slow motion. The exhibition included such works as 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), Play Dead; Real Time (2003), Henry Rebel (2011), Silence, Exile, Deceit: An Industrial Pantomime (2013) and emphasized how Gordon’s collection has grown since its first exhibition from 1999 in Poland and will continue to do so, as he updates the videos and films.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
Film-Philosophy
Using Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address i... more Using Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address is encouraged when one attends to the ways in which on-screen cinematic audio-visual spectacles are produced through the interaction of different bodies on-screen. Affective cinematic encounters open up other ways of understanding the female body as productive assemblages of everyday affective interactions and relationalities with other bodies within material culture. Particularly, I demonstrate an affective mode of address that attends to the interaction of cinematic objects and how they are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen to reveal hidden dynamics to characters’ relationship and overarching narratives off-screen.
International Journal of Diaspora&Cultural Criticism, 2020
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2014
While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have alter... more While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have altered and continued to affect audience’s cinematic experiences, the question is not so much how technology has increased possibility of a sensory response to cinema, rather, it is one that exposes how such technological changes only underscore the participation of our senses and the body in one’s experience of watching film, highlighting the inherently sensorial nature of the cinematic experience. This paper aims to address the above question through an olfactory cinema, by close analysis of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) by Tom Tykwer. What is an olfactory cinema, and how can such an approach better our understanding of sensorial aspects found within a cinema that ostensibly favours audio-visual senses? What can we benefit from an olfactory cinema? Perhaps, it is through an olfactory cinema that one may begin to embrace the sensual quality of cinema that has been overshadowed by t...
What can cinema as an industry and medium teach us about the roles and parameters that define a “... more What can cinema as an industry and medium teach us about the roles and parameters that define a “body” within a contemporary and globalised climate of interwoven flows of exchanges and practices? How does cinema make visible and tangible otherwise invisible transsensorial and affective modes of interactions that a body actively engages with other bodies, to create meanings beyond the limitations and capacities of a single body’s subjectivity and materiality? I address these areas of inquiry by examining four case studies of film examples produced from Singapore, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and America that feature ethnic “Chinese” bodies on screen. This thesis sets out to illustrate how meaning is easily imposed on bodies—whether tied to the ethnic, visual, or tangible—rendering them passive where they are mere products of social construction with no individual agency or autonomy. However, contemporary practices of filmmaking and new ways of thinking abo...