The work 影像連結/Un-exposing contains questions raising for myself once I decided to put down my camera. I aimed to “un-expose” through overlaying videos with different transparency levels. I am using my own archive to examine my perpetual gaze: a westernized gaze looking back at China and my outsider gaze looking at America; or my privileged gaze trying to “help” voice out the complexity of the other who were also caught up in conflicts between cultures, borders and systems. It was to reflect on every exposure and every choice of looking with my own archives. The different frame sizes and the montage logic were geared to connect the observed, the remembered and the consciousness. My impulse of capturing and recording was to fill the crack between personal memory and reality impacted by the cultural and sociopolitical dislocations. I had to rely on personal imagery to reconcile the shame and rejection of my identity while oscillating between external systems as a spectator. However, the conflicts between cultures, countries and ideologies augmented the weaponization of the camera gaze, especially with mobile recording devices. 

My wish to “un-expose” was to form a “connection” (影像連結) with images and videos. Thus the title of the project is mutually untranslatable in both Chinese and English. I hope to gather the light and sound of these memories and fantasies, with an intentional choice of not explaining with text or subtitles, to confront, reconcile and reflect with the digital image of the light and shadow between our oscillating world. Until later I realized neither the conflict of cultural ideologies nor camera weaponization could be reconciled.

At last, a layer of consistent video track in the background was to remind us at every second of the beauty of the light originated from the sun is what we can all see.

Hua Xi Zi works and thinks about light and the experience of seeing – in exploring the flowing life and one’s relation with outside systems. From celluloid film, analogue video signal to digital video processing, screen-based and optical projections, installed and performed, Xi Zi questions the existing methods of shadow-image production by experimenting with alternative ways to “un-expose.” It is the refusal to use representational images to explicitly represent one topic, community, or ideology. Her practice and research turned into materiality while asking questions about spectatorship and participation – seeking for the tenderness that withholds freedom and forgiveness. Hua Xi Zi received her MFA in Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA in Cinema and Media Studies at University of Southern California.