Asian-American

This is not a sight-seeing film, but a poetic journey through light and darkness reflected on the city of New York, where I often found empty spaces and times like Ma in Japanese.  You do not often see the people walking on the streets or in the buildings, but you may feel the air and the light coming and going.  It's not a deserted city, but a city full of energy that is there even without the people.  You see the wind is blowing as the bubbles are floating over Wall Street, then up, up to the sky.  The Sun sets under the Washington Bridge, where all the cars are runnin

A collection of early conceptually oriented videos which were produced in Tokyo in the early 1970s using words along with images, except for the first two flicker-effect pieces: A Chair (1970) and Blinking (1970). 

Time Tunnel (1971) is an attempt at time travel in a very conceptual sense. 

Man and Woman (1971) shows full body images of a naked man and woman shot from above without movement.  They are shown alone as well as together, one over (or under) the other, symbolizing words at the same time as their positions. 

"Combining the comical with the absurd, I created six funny faces to animate the images of Japanese vowels while differentiating between 'image', 'letter', and 'voice'."

--Takahiko iimura

"iimura deconstructs our coherence as he shifts between the English roman alphabet and Japanese characters, interjects spoken Japanese, and manipulates the computer images of his features.  The images often take on geometrical shapes, others recall the classical images from Japanese woodcuts of Samurai warrior grimace."

--Robert West, Curator, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC

The Blindness Series consists of eight short videos that investigate blindness and metaphors. Topics of individual tites include cosmetic surgery of the eyelids, vision and sexuality, video surveillance, hysterical blindness, alexia or word-blindness, and physical blindness. The series examines instrumental vision while offering a different kind of visuality, a haptic visuality. Stylistically, Tran's critical approach to video art is essayistic, theoretical, and politically engaged.

Known for his fast-paced and hilarious videos exploring Hapa identity and Asian American media portrayal, artist Kip Fulbeck has been featured on CNN, MTV and PBS. A professor of Art at UCSB, he exhibits and performs throughout the world and is the author of several books.

Volume 1 includes: Game of Death, A Day at the Fair, Banana Split, Lilo and Me, A Man for You, Rock & Roll Pug Run and Special Feature

"Hilarious from the start." 

--Giant Robot Magazine

Snapshots of individuals from all parts of Asia and the Pacific Islands form a stream of images that blankly proves the fallacy of the title phrase. Soe challenges viewers to recognize the failure of vision that underlies this common misperception, and the failure of understanding that creates and propagates such generalizations.

Spanish subtitled version available.

You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE. Years, decades go by and you continue, unseeing, possibly unseen. A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself "what used to be there?"  You are only vaguely aware of the district's shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th Century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops.