"Though Another" - PANDAS ARE PANDAS: Yuchi Ma, Closing Screening
Sunday, June 29; 2 – 4PM
Through Another brings together moving image works that explore how identity, memory, and belonging are shaped through proxy. Spanning animated rituals, speculative archives, and personal mythologies, these works explore the porous boundaries between home, nationhood, and belonging. A panda, a pig avatar, a fish bone, a mouth-shaped glyph, a lake named Perfect, among other surrogate figures, each becomes a proxy for the self, bearing witness to experiences that remain untranslated. Across these works, the body is mediated, the image becomes memorial, and language flickers. As the familiar becomes uncanny, and the personal shifts toward the allegorical, the program reflects on how we come to know ourselves through what stands in our place.
In a time when dominant narratives grow louder and more reductive, these works resist the pressure to resolve or conform. They move at a different tempo—slower, quieter, often elliptical. Through Another holds space for experiences shaped by migration, memory, and estrangement—but not always nameable. In that refusal, there is a quiet resistance: a commitment to ambiguity, to tenderness, and to forms of seeing and speaking that remain outside the demands of clarity or utility.
List of Artists/Works:
* Leming Chung
* My Doctor’s Prescription for my pollen allergy is to let the light illuminate everywhere (9min08s, 2020)
* This is a three-character monologue about be-ing, bee, and bees.
* Zhengyang Huang + Zhengzhou Huang
* Digital Twin (1min54s)
* Our Agent excerpt (1min08s, 2021)
* Our Agent is created at the height of zero-covid Chinese lockdown and the online / offline protests all over the world, while also at the crux of our personal dilemma in US visa, familial wishes, career paths, romantic relationships and staying-in-closet. In this video project, we assign the pig avatar as an agent to experience possible life events—get locked down, receive PCR tests at a kiosk, get a tech job and overwork at night, get recognized and invited to an artist talk, register a marriage at a governmental office, come out in a video call, return home and have a family gathering.
* Carrie Chen
* Eye Exercise 眼保健操（2023)
* Eye Exercise 眼保健操 is an animated portrait series of the artist’s younger avatar-self. This ongoing body of work draws from her childhood memories of the daily exercise required in mainland Chinese schools, a practice unheard of in most countries.
* Yuchi Ma
* Pandas are Pandas (12min, 2025)
* “Pandas Are Pandas” is an experimental video exploring the Giant Panda as both national icon and diasporic metaphor. Using the 2023 recall of pandas to China as a starting point, the filmmaker draws parallels with their own experience as a Parachute Kid—sent abroad and later uprooted. Blending archival footage, personal memory, and pop culture, the work reflects on migration, identity, and the strange afterlives of cultural symbols caught between belonging and displacement.
* Ruoyi Shi
* Unreadable 口 （7min, 2023? 2024?)
* A vision therapy video that helps improving reading comprehension and reading speed. When a computer program cannot recognize foreign characters, it often uses hollow square shapes as the placeholder. These squares, sharing the same shape as the Chinese word (口/Kou)," meaning "mouth" in English. Originating from Pictograms, Chinese characters are simplified depictions of tangible objects. They evolved from literal representations to encompass symbolic and metaphoric meanings. The character “Kou/口" not only signifies actions involving the mouth but also serves as a fundamental element in the structure of other characters.
* As a vision therapist, I modified texts from the chosen paragraph, keeping only the square shapes. These squares are used to form content that is both readable and unreadable, speakable and unspeakable to all of us.
* Kevin Tian
* Arrival / Departure 到达 / 出发（9min, 2018）
* A girl returns to her childhood home on the outskirts of Earth’s Fig)Capital from the Jupiter Colonies. A message had reached her from across the stars. Someone arrives as someone departs. This may be a video about photochemical imprints of stillness & digital etchings of movement. This may be a film about the forgotten surrealness of a car, a bus & a plane. This may be a fragment of a recording of the transitory as embodied by flight.
* An Nguyen
* We used to take the long way home (13min15s, 2025)
* Returning to Vietnam for the first time since middle school, a teenage girl reunites with old friends for a nostalgic summer road trip to 'Lake Perfect.’ This film is a coming-of-age road movie about the hottest days of summer and friendship that spans across oceans of time.
* Sining Zhu
* Searching for Preopercular Bone (13min22s, 2023)
* The formation of the Salton Sea, located east of Los Angeles, was an accident based on the impact of human operations, where the water comes from the collapse of the dam of Colorado River. In 1905, people used the river water for agricultural irrigation, tourism and sewage discharge. Two years later, the breach in the levee was closed, but the wastewater that had been used was trapped in the parched Salton Basin. Excessive human intervention had left the water heavily laden with heavy metals and chemicals. The waters were no longer suitable for living creatures and a large number of fish were poisoned on the shore.In an area of about 20 square meters on the shore of Salton Sea Lake, we used gold panning as an excavation method to find 300 fish preopercular bones, where the respiration part of the fish is, and the external environment is exchanged with the internal environment here. This is the threshold of the life and death for fish. At very early stage, part of the fish flowed into the Salton Sea and stucked here, and the other part of the fish were placed for tourism purposes. Due to the impact of the Anthropocene, fish have to underThe forensic search is a powerful testimony. Through forensic practice, the direct consequences of globalized industrial encroachment emerge in the forensic witness. Coding, recording, archiving, and classifying the violence in material form gives a way to be interpreted by the large number of Chinese immigrants who arrived in California in 1848 to work on the gold rush and railroad construction. The gold pan carried both desire and labor, participating in the American dream of these Chinese immigrants. Between the fish immigrants and the Asian immigrants, we do not intend to find an absolute juxtaposition, but we hope to use an empathic cherishing as a gesture to dig the fish bones, trying to find the natural possibility of de-anthropocentrism.
* Camille Siyan Ji
* The Flame Still Burns (1min53s, 2023?)
* The Flame Still Burns is an 8mm film shot in the artist’s hometown in China, capturing fleeting moments of landscape and everyday life. Through the grain of film and the frame of windows, the familiar shifts into the uncanny, shaped by undercurrents of absence and time.
* Asuka Lin
* Into the Emerald Sea (20min15s, 2024)
* In this quiet fable, Suzu mysteriously emerges onto the beach of their hometown, and discovers their grandmother reincarnated as a sea turtle. Together, they must undergo their own processes of reconnection and find a new meaning of home.
* Michael Luo
* Juvenoia (10min, 2024)
* A zero player experience. Juvenoia presents shifting snapshots of my nostalgia for a village in Southwestern China that no longer exists, along with distorted dreamscapes caused by a weariness towards the adoptive country of America. It is an allegorical portrait of a diasporic coming of age.Being an immigrant in the West means killing the part of you grown from your home, your history, your language, your past, and your future. In retrospect, this work was an X-Ray of my illness, my unnamed dread, my dear home crushed by Chinese hegemonic modernization and American neoliberal capitalism. Juvenoia lives in the limbo of it all, as do I.
Artist Bios
Kevin Tian is the working alias for MSC_836, one of our designated observers of SolSystem_WorldLine.6479. Her current transmissions are encoded in a primitive form of slow-band visual-aural datastream apparently fitting for her environment.
Siyan Camille Ji is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BFA in Photography from CalArts and an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California. Ji's work begins with photography as a medium to reflect her inner experiences and perceptions through an outward gaze. She delves into the acts of memory and forgetting, exploring the interplay between personal recollections and broader historical narratives. Her practice emphasizes the subtle relationships between images, employing methods such as sequencing, interruption, and repetition to create “visual poetry” that extends the viewer's journey of memory. In her recent works, Ji integrates text, installation, and video to transform two-dimensional images into multidimensional "memoryscape", finding points of contact between human emotions and the disordered memories they induce.
Asuka Lin is a Japanese-Taiwanese writer/director known for their short films ‘Into the Emerald Sea’ (Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival), and ‘A.I. Mama’ (London Short Film Festival). Their directorial work travels from anarchic cyberpunk to meditative folktales, united by themes of displacement and conflicting realities informed by socio-ecological phases. They earned their BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in film/video, and works as a post-production coordinator for BluBird Post in Chicago.
Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Inspired by ancient tales and rituals intertwined with language, habits, and societal norms, she combines humor and fiction to construct her poetic narratives. Her work explores the interface between nature and artificial existences, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication. Ruoyi was born and raised in Nanjing, China. She is a recent MFA graduate from the California Institute of the Arts (2021) and received her BFA degree in sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2019.
