Tiger’s Head, Nail’s Tail: Yours Faithfully is an essay-film serving as the conceptual and psychological backbone of the multi-chapter research Tiger’s Head, Nail’s Tail. The project is an excavation of language, migration, and the political translation of memory across Southeast Asia.

The research is inspired by the life of Hui’s century-old grandfather and his migration from Chaozhou through Vietnam, eventually settling in Hong Kong. Central to this narrative is his past role as a scribe – an invisible intermediary who facilitated communication for Chinese migrants through the Qiaopi (or Silver Letters) system. This vital 20th-century network of correspondence and finance was a lifeline for the diaspora, yet it relied on the scribe to write, read, and perhaps censor the messages of others. Taking on the role of artist-interlocutor, Hui tracks these unofficial histories to reveal how personal narratives are adapted, mediated, and reshaped by geopolitical forces.

The project’s title derives from the name of the grandfather’s dog, “Tiger’s Head Nail’s Tail,” which misremembers the Chinese idiom “Tiger’s head snake’s tail”-to start with a bang and end with a whimper. Hui embraces this (mis)apprehension, which sharpens the idiom’s weak tail into a nail’s sting: a potent metaphor for the competing and often contradictory strands of oral history where each retelling presses a new point into the shifting contours of memory.

The essayfilm weaves together footage of conversations with Hui’s grandfather with archival material and newly shot footage from migration sites. It contextualizes the scribe’s role within the broader history of Qiaopi while reflecting on the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War era – from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China to the complex diplomatic shifts among newly decolonizing nations in Southeast Asia. Through this lens, the film explores the trust and time involved in historical letter transmission versus contemporary communication, reframing the act of transcribing to illuminate the emotional and political contours of a momentous displacement.

In its original installation, the work unfolds as a constellation including envelope-like listening stalls that house a 7-channel sound work, featuring rewritten personal accounts of migrants, whose final letter transcribed by the scribe are engraved on glass sculptures. This configuration creates a threshold between the private act of speaking and the public circulation of correspondence.

The online screener is a combined configuration of the essay-film and the sound composition Tiger’s Head, Nail’s Tail: Nanyang Sojourners. The soundscape layers the original spoken accounts of migrants with elements of Teochew Opera (a heritage link for many Qiaopi senders) and field recordings from various Chinatowns and Hong Kong. By weaving together historical echoes and environmental recordings, the work roots the viewer in the physical and emotional sites of the diaspora.

Wong Ka Ki – Editor
Guyshawn Wong – Composer and Sound Producer

Serene Hui is an artist currently based in the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Her practice is research-focused and multi-faceted, engaging primarily with installation, audio and live works, printmaking and text. Serene’s work is involved in a discursive, artistic and political exploration of her own context, using the geographical distance from personal lived experiences to investigate the wider socio-political impact of how meaning is made and who has access to making it. In her works she addresses obscurity and nuances by creating an ontological shift of displacement – meaning to transform social conventions and language ambiguity into resistance, reflection and criticism of contemporary systems.

Her current project Tiger’s Head, Nail’s Tail stems from her century-old Chinese grandfather’s oral histories, in turn leading into a thread of research that delves into the human migration and material flow around Southeast Asia, in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power during the cold war.

Serene’s works have been included in group exhibitions at the Thailand Biennale 2025; Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Kunsthalle Mechelen, Belgium; TENT, Rotterdam; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; MMCA, Seoul and elsewhere. Her print editions are collected by Masereel, Belgium; Huis van het Boek (Museum Meermanno) and KB National Library in the Netherlands. She has been an artist-in-residence at Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg; MMCA, Seoul; Nida Art Colony, Lithuania and more. Her artistic practice has been awarded by Mondriaan Fonds (The Netherlands) since 2023.