Door Games Window Frames: Near Drama is originally a generative 3-channel projection consisting of sequences of open-ended drama, now adapted into a single-channel, 3-window combinatorial drama. The work deploys a database of about 500 movie clips extracted from 11 HK Cantonese thrillers and melodramas from the early 1960s. Exploring the mannerism and formulaic structures of such films, I discovered a key feature – the frequent use of the opening and closing of doors to introduce a scene, and the use of windows to highlight emotively charged moments in melodrama.
In this piece, I have turned such door and window movements literally into a unique propeller of drama. As punctuations as well for emotive shifts, the combinatorial game I play with these clips constructs micro-narrative movements. The ‘near drama’ resulting from the combinatorial exercise could be frustrating for not delivering one straightforward story; but my method liberates every segment between the closing and opening of doors and windows to allow them to stand alone to perform its dramatic energy.
In this video version, the work has 3 chapters — “Trial & Speculations: spinning the wheel,” “Getting Serious” and “Behind the doors, in front of the windows” — laying out the process of studying door and window devices, at the same time brewing dramaticity without ever arriving at any single stable story.
The 500 clips were extracted with the following interest: (1) door and window shots from the 11 films, (2) the performance of the male protagonists — mainly 2 actors — in scenes with doors and windows, (3) the close-up shots of the facial expressions of female protagonists in the 11 films; (4) close-up shots of everyday objects, and (5) outdoor scenes that contain visual view of the city space of Hong Kong. Whereas the first three criteria set up my analytical-visual studies of the genre characteristics of these films, the latter two criteria form the anthropological-ethnnographic objectives of this project, acknowledging photography and cinema’s intrinsic power to preserve the looks and appearances of material existence from the past.

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.