KLEX Special Program: ARRIVAL. DEPARTURE.

Curated by Siew-Wai Kok, KLEX Festival Director

This special KLEX program features works from women video artists and filmmakers from across Asia and beyond

The plane is landing. We are anticipating. An adventure that transcends time and space, on another side of the planet. And then, of another dimension. Dance, dance with your inner soul, crossing the clouds and oceans, meeting your beloved ancestors when they were young. An otherworldly song is heard, as if it has been chanting for centuries, in your heart. What a beauty, what an amazing journey! And here we go, again!

"Arrival. Departure." is a new KLEX special program consisting of works from six female artists from Malaysia, Taiwan and the USA. The works include realtime processing video art, experimental dance film, stop-motion animation, diary film, and poetry film, exploring themes such as memory, history, self and cultural identity, physical and artificial landscapes, time, and mortality.

Total Run Time: 61 minutes

APPROACH
Debora Bernagozzi, 4:46 min/stereo sound/colour, 2025, USA

Approach was created through iterative, realtime video processing and chance layering of diegetic sound. I have for years done live processing as a way of embodying my experience of moving through the world, with the organic nature of the processing creating a resonance that invites viewers to feel the work rather than viewing a narrative. Our experiences are filtered through layers of memories, anticipations, sensations, and thoughts. My abstraction through video synthesis is a more accurate representation of moments in my world.

LATEX LABYRINTH
Wey-Yinn TEO, 12:38 min/sound/colour, 2024, Malaysia

An old man awakens in a deforested rubber estate and finds himself in the colonial past. A distant old folk song ripples as he falls into the eternal loop of rubber tapping.

CHA BUTE MENING
Raito LOW Jing-Yi, 10:39 min/sound/colour, 2024, Taiwan/Malaysia

In places where similarities appear, there are peculiar intersections that Wittgenstein referred to as "family resemblances." The more we seek commonalities between different cultures, the more we amplify their differences; seeing the silhouette of home from afar is no coincidence. Nostalgia begins with our departure from it, and this sense of being both near and far allows us to rediscover our own context. A hundred years ago, Baba-Nyonya tiles and Sarawak indigenous ceramic beads arrived with the ocean currents... Through the process of cultural fusion, we expand our imagination of home. It becomes rich and diverse, and as we travel, foreign lands gradually take the shape of home.

åi(ʌɪ)
SIM Hoi-Ling, 9:00 min/sound/colour, 2026, Malaysia

A video that compiles footage of human interaction with artificial agents, curiously watching the evolvement in human-to-agents interaction. Constant digital accompaniment was impossible until mobile devices became increasingly powerful. Text messages and synthesized voices become more than tools of communication, until attachment, dependence, and vulnerability no longer negotiated between humans, yet increasingly shaped, prompted, and sustained through artificial interlocutors.

QING MING 清明
Siew-Wai KOK, 13:00 min/sound/colour, 2011, Malaysia

A home video of the artist's family paying tribute to their departed ancestors during the memorial festival known as Qing Ming, a traditional Chinese ritual marked by sweeping of graves, laying offerings and burning joss paper. Through the artist's viewfinder, we witness a quiet and restrained family where love and affection are rarely spoken aloud. A moment of stillness - an intimate meditation on longing, time and mortality.

MIDNIGHT, THE ZERO HOUR
YE Mimi, 9:52 min/sound/colour, 2025, Taiwan

In the farcical exchange between the poet and the harmonic pipe, you will silently count from zero to nine. Then you will hear the chirping of insects from Borneo, the clear and pleasant sounds of the Dai Bilangdao flute, impromptu shamanic chanting and fragments of highly treasured visual relics that the poet has gleaned with her eyes during her travels.

*The poem in chinese language was published in Ye Mimi's poetry collection "WuWu."(2023). Translated by Steve Bradbury.

"A woman who looks like a house shrew snuck off to the darkroom to drink a cup of soup.
Two people who'd given up on love lingered in the street wondering where to part. The dog trapped in the 33-story Ferris wheel weighs 333 liters.
With only four bare walls for a home, dangers lurk on every side; vanity thy name is she is completely uncalled for.
He used a 0.55555 cm knitting needle to prick the enmity of the night.
Sixty-six of the toothy belittled were running amuck in my stomach.
It dances 7 drops of fat and hurls the Honeycrisp apple into the well.
Eggs with no blood-relation to deadweight bastards are the fittest for being born.
Upon turning off the lights for nine minutes steam yourself until done."

Artist Bios:

Debora Bernagozzi works primarily with the mediums of video, photography, and fiber. Her creative process is experiential, whether with realtime experimental video synthesis, documentary photography or lacemaking. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally. Debora is Co-founder and Executive Director of the experimental media arts non-profit Signal Culture. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, including at the Denver Art Museum, Burchfield Penney Museum, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video and Music Festival. She was awarded artist residencies at the Experimental Television Center, Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, and in Kuala Lumpur. Her essays "Video Synthesis: Waveforms, Disruptions, Transformations, and Anti-Obsolescence" and "Signal Culture: Experimental Media Art, Community, Preservation, and Play" were published in both English and Polish in Videosyntezy 2, a book accompanying Intermediale Festival of Audiovisual Forms, Legnica, Poland.

Wey-Yinn TEO is a Kuala Lumpur based non-binary film worker whose career revolves around filmmaking since 2014. Her works of sound and moving image often drift away from realms of reality and truth, where she explores the idea of liminality and the spectrum of the human experience. Her debut short film ‘Enflightenment’ (2023) won the audience award at Short waves Festival, Poland; the film then screened at Beijing International Short Film Festival, XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin, and Leiden Shorts in the Netherlands. Yinn is deeply passionate in translating the synthesis of art, music, stories and fantasy into a symphonic sky of stars on a cloudless dark night – an encompassing space that is sincere, complex, and has power to touch and heal.

Raito LOW Jing-Yi is an animation director from Malaysia based in Taiwan. Specializing in stop-motion animation. Currently studying at NTUA MAA master’s program, director of Raito's Art Studio. Adhering to the spirit of experimental animation, using plants as medium to create visuals that combine humanities and nature. Personal work including <Blüte>, has been shortlisted in more than 100 film festivals. Published "Like Water, We Flow" together with Ma Li.

SIM Hoi-Ling is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is deeply influenced by photography. Her curiosity often sparks around themes of decay and absurdities in daily life. She is passionate about exploring unconventional methods of image-making, and her diverse body of work includes printmaking, video art, installation, and performance. Her work was presented at festivals across Canada, Lithuania, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand & the United States. She loves collecting sound in her free time and occasionally releases her experimental sound works under the group name DSGN. (dsgn.bandcamp.com).

From Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Siew-Wai KOK started as a video artist, now active as a vocal improviser and artist-curator. She was based in the USA from 1998-2005, received a B.A. in Media Study at the State University of New York (Buffalo), and an M.F.A. in Electronic Integrated Arts at Alfred University. Siew-Wai shown her videos, curatorial video programs and performed in Asia, Australia, Europe, USA, including Suspaustas Laikas Film Festival 2024, CTM Festival 2019, Image Forum Festival 2019, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival 2021, allEars Improvised Music Festival 2018, Kaohsiung Film Festival 2018, Singapore International Film Festival 2015, ARKIPEL 2015, Asian Meeting Festival 2015 & 2025, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2007 (Netherlands), Les Rencontres Internationales 2007 (France) amongst others. Siew Wai is the co-founder of KLEX - Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival.

YE Mimi is a Taiwanese poet, filmmaker and "Poetry Tarot" spiritual counselor who studied film at the Chicago Art Institute's MFA Program in Film, Video and New Media. Her most recent book publication is WuWuWu, a two-volume box set of poems and essays she has written on shamanic rituals and funerals she witnessed and filmed in China and Indonesia.