Avant-Garde Film Takes Over M+

Time heals all wounds. Time waits for no man. A waste of time. The clock is ticking. The concept of time is one that shapes, guides and defines our lives in so many ways it’s the basis of dozens if not hundreds of idioms in English alone. Sometimes it’s referred to as a fourth dimension. Ironically, at a time when mainstream films are criticised for egregious running times, time itself is the theme for the second edition of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025 at M+: Time Will Tell.

In a press release, M+ Moving Image lead curator Silke Schmickl noted, “The existential topic has become more critical since the massive transformation of our societies through globalisation and digitalisation exposed us to simultaneous time and constant acceleration.” In some ways we seem to have defeated the march of time — we can be in two places at once thanks to digital communications — but in just as many ways we are still subjugated to it.

“We [felt] that time has been such a fundamental consideration for moving image artists working in a time-based medium ever since the advent of experimental film, and we’re interested in the way artists for the past 60 years have used time as both a theme as well as a lens through which to experiment with the form,” elaborates M+ moving image curator Ulanda Blair. The 16 screening programmes approach time from perspectives as diverse as national, personal and natural histories, and through technical manipulation, such as film speed and loop multiplicities, making time a rich topic. 

“We’re living in a time that feels particularly accelerated,” says Blair, noting that the internet and smartphones — and now AI — have changed the way we communicate with each other. “Our decision-making is faster. Our attention spans are shorter, and it just feels pertinent. People like Tehching Hsieh have made these incredibly radical durational pieces, and it feels especially subversive to revisit those types of actions in this day and age, and this context.”

Truth and memory

In its inaugural edition in 2024, the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival (AAGFF) explored the history of the avant-garde in Asia and examined how filmmakers disrupted dominant narratives and challenged the artistic establishment – as the avant-garde does by definition. For time this year, the innovative and experimental films on the programme will interrogate truth and memory, explore the manipulation of time and use film as a physical metric for measuring time itself. In a total of 36 screenings, talks, performances, workshops and other activites this year, the AAGFF will spotlight key pieces from M+’s collection and participation from some of Asia’s most compelling artists, including Hsieh, Amar Kanwar, Chikako Yamashiro and Ho Tzu Nyen — whose work is being broadcast on the M+ façade until next month — and Hong Kong artists such as May Fung, founder of ACO, and co-founder of Videotage.

Taiwanese-born performance artist Hsieh is one of the world’s preeminent artists of his kind, and in addition to a presentation that contemplates the passage of time next to the Grand Stair, the Festival Lounge Conversations series will host Hsieh every day for discussions reflecting on his body of work. Selections from his groundbreaking One Year Performance durational works (1978 to 2000), “Cage Piece,” “Time Clock Piece,” “Outdoor Piece,” “Rope Piece,” “No Art Piece,” and “Thirteen Year Plan” will all be presented alongside the singular opportunity to gain more insight into his art. Hsieh’s work has been called an exploration of time and struggle, filtered through any number of social institutions – from incarceration to relationships. M+ acquired all six of Hsieh’s Life Works in 2013, knowing full well that the museum would demand anchor figures that could “really tell the story of global visual culture from the perspective of Asia,” says Blair.

If Hsieh is the year’s star artist, Ho Tzu Nyen and composer Wong Hin-yan’s “Timepieces” may be the star artwork. Ho, a Singaporean artist renowned for how he weaves together myth and reality to reevaluate Asian history, and Hong Kong indie singer-songwriter Wong (a Golden Horse Award winner for Best Original Film Score for The Narrow Road) join forces on the museum’s Grand Stair for a live cinema performance commissioned for the AAGFF. The multi-sensory performance aims to offer an immersive temporal experience through a single big screen installation accompanied by Wong’s score combining music and spoken haikus (in Cantonese and English). The film, which comprises segments lifted from Ho’s ongoing 43-channel installation T for Time, pulls images from astronomy, astrology, cosmology and chronology, and runs on an algorithm. “Rather than having this linear, start-to-finish idea of time, there’s a sort of randomised aspect to it,” notes Blair.

Among the presentations in the cinemas, Sek Kei’s Dead Knot (1969) — co-directed by a very young John Woo — Law Kar’s Routine (1968) and Begging (1970), and Thought IV: The Edge of the World (1989) by May Fung come together in Early Avant-Garde Filmmaking in Hong Kong, a trip through local film history during time when it was dominated by martial arts adventures and crime thrillers. Sek Kei (also known as Wong Chi-keung) and Law are best known as trailblazing film critics; the former is also the co-founder of the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the latter a respected curator and historian. Fung is a co-founder of experimental theatre group Zuni Icosahedron, Videotage and the Foo Tak Building, a vertical artists village.

The programme is actually titled “Reflections of an Era,” and as Blair sees it, the films are precisely that. “Film and video is such an immediate art form. Artists can respond to the social conditions of their time in a very instant way,” she says. “That [enabled] them to capture the spirit of the time, the restlessness of the city in the late 1960s and in May’s case, in the late 1980s.” Fung’s film could just as easily be a snapshot of 2025, as it pivots on what it was like to be a young Hong Kong woman at the time, feeling helpless about the war in the Middle East and geopolitical tensions. It’s as if time were frozen.

Hong Kong artist Ali Wong Kit-yi’s commissioned Timebombs! is a karaoke-based investigation of time as viewed through both Eastern and Western perspectives as to how corporeal time constraints inform our life choices – particularly women’s. Wong asks about subjects as diverse as climate change and global fertility crisis from an unabashedly feminist lens and contemplates the answers of how women might view, feel and experience time uniquely. After all, women have been saddled with a so-called biological clock. “This sort of karaoke performance format is also quite playful, quite fun,” Blair notes of Wong’s unique and youthful voice. “Ali’s someone who is always thinking about very current ideas; there’s a sort of urgency to the ideas that she’s exploring. She certainly brings a different sensibility to the festival.”

On the horizon

AAGFF 2025: Time Will Tell hasn’t started yet, but Blair and the rest of M+’s curators are already looking ahead to 2026 and beyond. New for this year is a programme of shorts curated for children and presented on a loop and admission-free. The films come from around Asia and are by New Zealander Len Lye, Chinese artists Zhu Jia and Zhang Qing, Taiwan-based animator Raito Low, Indonesian collective Tromarama, Hongkonger Florence Yuk-ki lee and Japan’s Koki Tanaka. Finishes Blair: “We’re trying to offer a diversity of experiences for different types of audiences and make the festival feel dynamic, with different access points for people that are inevitably going to have very different interests.”

The Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025: Time Will Tell runs from 30 May to 1 June 2025. Festival (HK$750) and Day (HK$250) passes are available; full details at aagff.mplus.org.hk.