An immersive, inward-diving experience of multi-screen moving images, Soft Sacks, Velvet Dark presents four video works in sequence, transitioning from single-screen to triple-screen. It contemplates corporeal interconnections woven through the invisible linkages of interiority, viscerality, and darkness. The short films and video works in this screening delineate bodies—both living and dead, human and vegetal—as malleable carriers of dreams, memories, wounds, and histories of violence.  

Ma Qiusha presents a monologue delivered with a razor blade in her mouth, recounting childhood memories in which a mother’s love is felt as both selfless and violent. Mai Ling challenges conventional understandings of Asian femininity by drawing connections between women's bodies and kudzu plants. Maya Watanabe documents the interior of a skull as an intricate landscape, tracing Peru’s internal armed conflict between 1980 and 2000. Han Mengyun reflects on her own post-partum depression through Buddhist sutras and considers how women’s experiences might connect across different regions and time periods. Rendered as an essential part of corporeal experience, the conceptual and visual themes of darkness and night are explored deeper with the multiplication of projection screens—both for the felt vulnerabilities they harbour and for regenerative power they summon. 

The screening is introduced by Qu Chang (HKW, Berlin) and Jessica Kwok (Asymmetry Foundation, London). 

Screening list: 

Maya Watanabe, Bullet, 2021, 10' 
Ma Qiusha, From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili, 2007, 7' 54" 
|Mai Ling, Becoming Stickiness, 2023, 25' 07" 
Han Mengyun, Night Sutra, 2024, 46' 13"