Explore local ruins. Take a walk in the park. Spy on your parents.
Hello! Shadow Kitchen this month will be held at Chinatown’s Plot on the occasion of LA Design Weekend. Run by artist Alice Yuan Zhang, Plot is a beautiful small art space that hosts workshops with local artists and sells curated artworks, art pieces, furniture and books all about design and aesthetics.
With Plot’s Chinatown location in mind, September’s film programme features works from China and Taiwan, about China and/or Taiwan, by filmmakers from China, Taiwan and elsewhere. When visitors come to this strange theme park-ish location, what version of ‘China’ do they see and does it ring true? As LA’s Chinatown changes the way neighbourhoods naturally change with gentrification, out-pricing and other factors, our instinct is to preserve its history – but is our clinging to the past only a symptom of unnecessary nostalgia for an idea with an already contentious history? Spaces, Places, Faces & Ghosts allows us to consider what of ‘place’ and ‘time’ factors into our practice (if we are makers) and our way of seeing.
PROGRAM
PT 1
IN MEMORY OF THE CHINATOWN
(dir. Chen Chun-Tien | 2016 | Taiwan)
May a building have its own reincarnation? Once upon a time, there’s a region of canal’s dockyard in the center of Tainan city in Taiwan. Later in 1970s, the canal gradually lost its function and the large residential and commercial mixed mall “Chinatown” had been built at the site.
Chinatown was once the most prosperous mall in the city; however, by more than three decades of rise and fall, the city’s authority planned to demolish the building for urban renewal plan. The Chinatown makes no exception of those failing shopping malls all around this island. As for those residents who have lived in the Chinatown for a long time experience most of the death and life of the city.
VIVE GOOGLE MAPS, VIVE L’AMOUR
(dir. Chen Hsin-Yu | 2018 | Taiwan)
Vive Google Maps, Vive L’Amour juxtaposes a walking sequence from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour (1994) with a real-time recreation on a similar walk following Google Maps. By contrasting the cityscape extracted from a fiction film and the all-pervading Google Maps, the video explores our perception of space, traces of collective memories, and the impact of documentation in the juxtaposition of the same location of different temporality presented as framed moving images.
FROM A DISTANCE
(dir. Zhao Liang | 2020 | China, USA)
During summer break, a young woman returns to her hometown in Guizhou. Through a gaze that feels both distant and intimate, she rediscovers the people and places she once knew, confronting the subtle changes of time, memory, and belonging.
TRT: 52 minutes
PT 2
YUMEN
(dir. Xu Ruotao, J.P. Sniadecki, Xiang Huang | 2013 | USA, China)
Set in the quasi-ghost town of Yumen that once thrived with oil production in China’s arid northwest, YUMEN is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection and a collective past among the town’s crumbling landscape. One part “ruin porn”, one part ghost story, and shot entirely on 16mm, the film brings together narrative gesture, performance art, and socialist realism into a crude and radiant collage that not only plays with convention and defies genre, but also pays homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.
Thanks to Cinema Guild for supporting the screening of this film.
TRT: 65 minutes
FILMMAKERS
Chun-Tien Chen
Taiwanese director Chun-Tien Chen (1989) graduated in documentary filmmaking from Tainan National University of the Arts. Chen makes documentary, animated and experimental films with his topics being, most frequently, architecture and changes in urban environments. In 2021, he premiered his fiction feature debut, A Long Goodbye to the Origin.
Hsin-Yu Chen
Hsin-Yu Chen is an artist filmmaker from Taipei, Taiwan, currently based in Berlin. He draws on border landscapes, embodied knowledge, and systems of measurement and categorization to examine the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject.
His work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-gah Museum; Proyector – Festival de Videoarte; Prismatic Ground; Image Forum Festival; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Kassel Dokfest; 25 FPS; and Arkipel. He received the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for an Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the 2025 Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has participated in FIDCampus, Oberhausen Seminar, and residencies including RAIR Philadelphia, Cité Internationale des Arts, and Braunschweig Projects 2025/2026.
https://hsinyuchen.com
Zhao Liang
Born in Guizhou, China, Zhao Liang grew up amidst the mountains of the Southwest. At eighteen, she arrived at Beijing—a city of vast skies and strong winds—before moving to Los Angeles, where she lived and studied in a dry, arid climate. She is currently based in Taiwan, where she is rediscovering the humid, subtropical environment. Her creative process is rooted in observation; she is fascinated by those hidden moments in life where the small reveals the significant. Through her work, she seeks to unveil the diverse facets of people as they navigate their everyday lives.
https://www.liangzhaoliang.com
