M+ Cinema autumn edition and Facade commission

M+ Facade
M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong, is excited to present Jade Jadeite (2024), a new moving image commission by Chinese artist and filmmaker Zhou Tao. The work will be screened on the M+ Facade at night from Thursday, November 7, 2024, to Sunday, January 26, 2025. In conjunction with this commission, M+ Cinema will screen two of Zhou’s award-winning works, The Worldly Cave (2017) and The Periphery of the Base (2024), on Saturday, November 2, 2024.

Jade Jadeite’s playfully alliterative title is a poetic metaphor for Hong Kong, portraying it as a shining gem. The film unfolds as a sequence of river landscapes, from the west of the Pearl River system in mainland China to Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, ending at M+. While the work seems to depict one continuous journey, it is actually a montage, combining scenes from different times and places to connect the vibrant communities of the Pearl River and Hong Kong. Zhou intersplices these vignettes with abstract, unfocussed interstitials of reflected sunlight. These transitions hide cuts between locations, creating a serene and surreal vision of the region. The resulting effect recalls the experience of viewing an ink landscape scroll, blending realism with a poetic understanding of our world.

M+ Cinema
For the 2024 Autumn Edition, M+ Cinema presents Tsui Hark, the Free-Spirited Trailblazer, featuring twelve works by the renowned Hong Kong filmmaker, including Shanghai Blues 2024 (4K Restoration) (1984/2024), Once Upon a Time in China (1991), and The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014). The retrospective will also include an in-person conversation between Tsui and director, actress, and filmmaker Sylvia Chang, presented alongside Tsui’s directorial debut The Butterfly Murders (1979).

Avant-Garde Now is a new regular series of day-long events that explore novel tendencies in contemporary artists’ films. The inaugural edition, Performing for the Camera, focuses on performance art on film, featuring screenings, discussions, and live performances by Eisa Jocson, Florence Lam, Melati Suryodarmo, and Kawita Vatanajyankur. The day-long event examines the body’s relationship to spectacle, labour, capitalism, technology, endurance, vulnerability, and failure. The guest artists will share insights into the creative processes, inspirations, and intentions behind their performative practices.

Complementing the ongoing Special Exhibition I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture, the documentary First Person Singular: I. M. Pei (1997) sees the renowned architect posing as a cheerful tour guide and leading the audience through his architectural masterpieces. Yellow Is Forbidden (2018), screened in conjunction with the Special Exhibition Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination, documents the triumphs and struggles of Guo Pei as she breaks into the prestigious but exclusive world of haute couture.

This edition’s Stair in the Dark inaugurates Dissonant Pleasures, a new monthly series spotlighting works overshadowed by the mainstream that have nevertheless made a lasting impact on cinema culture, including The Blair Witch Project (1999), Audition (1999), and American Psycho (2000).