A game of montage art, Doors Medley is a re-mix of two existing work of mine – Door Game (2005, 26m) and Door Games Window Frames (2012, 11m30s), which explores visual mannerisms and formulaic structures of film melodrama of the 1960s in Hong Kong. Doors Medley highlights specifically gender paradigms embedded in popular culture. From anthropology’s viewpoint, we have created drama and we also reenacted the drama we create. Popular cultural texts fine-tune specific course of events with narrative logic, which we fervently imitate to act out our daily roles. Isolated narrative fragments, as they are subject to free combination, reveal their hidden predispositions.

《重重門。門對門。》是我另一個的個蒙太奇創作遊戲。我把兩個已發表的錄像作品－2005年的《戲門》(26’)和2012年的《景框戲門》(11’30”) －重新整合，從上世紀六十年代港產文藝片的板斧，進一步鑽進性別模式在視覺風格和敘事結構上可尋的蛛絲馬跡。我們創造戲劇，提煉出有特定走勢的劇情…。到頭來，又契而不捨的模仿著，作為上演每天生活的 綱領。似是而非的劇力把我們吸進情愛道義的門內，塑造了我們日常生活的倫理。透過蒙太奇的遊戲，我希望重新打開看似單純的每一個鏡頭；臉上一顰一笑、門窗一開一關、人情道義… 向我們展示的會是甚麼？

(Chinese version courtesy of artist’s website)

Known for her work in intermedia arts and media archaeology, Hong Kong-based transdisciplinary artist and scholar Linda Chiu-han Lai brings together her videography, experimental arts and pedagogy onto a new research-creation ontology that is at once critical, new-materialist, nomadic-feminist and speculative. Her works often explore time and narrativity in spatial terms — complex linearity, thick descriptions, scaling, montage, and image as objectile. Central to Lai’s works is her historiographic experiments, especially the moving image’s power to work against grand narratives and “central conflict” assumptions. In particular, she concentrates on videography’s performative functions to materialize the history of everyday life as indeterminate processes, and as fragmented yet rich miniatures with near drama potentials. Prompted by edia-archaeological concern, Lai moves beyond the documentary as a genre to focus on “documentary impulses” to re-envision the history of the moving image alongside other art forms as mnemonic practices. Currently, she revisits the video essay’s relevance to contemporary times.

Lai’s works have been published in short film, experimental and documentary festivals, and have travelled as part of Hong Kong video art showcases, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Open City London Documentary Festival, LOOP Barcelona, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, the Fourth State of Water (CoCA, Torun, Poland), Women Make Waves Film Festival (Taipei), International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul, and more. Solo retrospective-screenings were presented at the Experimental Film/Video Festival in Macao (EXiM 2015), Seoul (EXiS 2017), Centro de Creación Contemporanea de Andalucia (Cordoba, 2021) and the LSK School of Creativity (Hong Kong, 2025). Lai’s video works are held in collections of the M-plus, Asia Art Archive and Video Bureau (Guangzhou, Beijing). Her on-line video zine project D-Normal/V-Essay with Floating Projects is a winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the Art(ists)” 2022. Between 2016 and 2021, she published two issues of Video Manifestos, involving over 80 artists from Hong Kong and around the world.

Lai’s 25 years of faculty life at the School of Creative Media (SCM) has been a vibrant journey in search of meaningful extensions of her PhD training in Cinema Studies (Tisch, NYU). Officially retired from SCM in July 2023, she has remained an active artist, writer, researcher and art facilitator. She held her mixed media solo show “Folds, Wrinkles and Crevices of the Everyday” in Oct-Nov 2025, marking her moves into interspecies thinking and advanced research in media archaeology as art. She was Leader of the Oberhausen Seminar at the 72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 28 April to 3 May 2026.