On and Off-Screen Imaginaries

Six essays by the artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia that propose a framework for an exilic, fugitive cinema, written in the aftermath of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests.

The essays take up geopolitics in cinema, image circulation and national imaginaries, and survey a new documentary vernacular produced by filmmakers who have broken from the nostalgia of Hong Kong's cinematic golden age. Sia turns to the Cold War and its afterlives, looking at ad hoc distribution networks, speculative and performative re-enactment, and countergeographic landscape imaging. Jean Ma writes the foreword. Film stills, photographs by An-my Lê and images from Sia's short film The Sojourn (2023) sit between the essays.

Sia is an artist, filmmaker and writer based in New York whose work examines how print and film trace and enable power, especially in constructing images of Hong Kong. Her short films include Never Rest/Unrest (2020), Do Not Circulate (2021) and What Rules the Invisible (2022). Earlier books are Too Salty Too Wet (Speculative Place, 2020) and Salty Wet (Inpatient Press, 2019).