Inter-Asia Intermediality: A Two-Part International Workshop

In a significant contribution to the intermediality of cinema, where art exhibition enters into political conversations with contemporaneous film projects, Jihoon Kim’s reading of Apichaptong Weerasethakul’s earlier works depicts the re-channeling of time and space in global independent cinema. For instance, turning toward the excessive shot durations of Syndromes and a Century (2006), where cuts in visual space are contradicted in voices that carry-over from prior dialogues, Kim illuminates how the film’s expanded spatiality is reliant on the continuity of sound. When Kim observes that soldiers recovering a dead body in a grassy meadow, in the first scene of Tropical Malady (2004), may align with the transmigration into the beastly creature of the film’s second half, he is highlighting Apichatpong’s departures from Western notions of linearity. From discontinuous duration to Apichatpong’s bifurcated “split” narratives, these films are transcending any sort of homogenous allegory because their contexts are unstable. In this sense, the openness of gallery installation–where multiple screens open variations in the asynchronous play of memory–augments and informs the diegesis of Apichatpong’s work. Kim’s depiction of these durations as “time zones” encourages me to consider the periodization of the work within the militarization of Thai politics where seemingly antiquated memories of dictatorship concluded in 1992 make an unlikely return in post-coup worlds of 2006 and 2014. The following reading of his work looks specifically at the relationship between sound and politics that crystalize in the interplay of installation art and cinema in Fever Room (2015) and the over-emphasis on sonic experience in Memoria (2021). Sound, as Ben Tausig has shown, is a central feature in the politics of resistance in Thailand’s post-coup era, as the microphones and amplifiers of protestors face-off with the resonance of national anthems and military speakers in public space. Apichaptong’s Assistant Director, Sompot Chidgasornpongse, addressed the national anthem’s saturation of public space by replacing it with Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1 in his sonic masterpiece Bangkok in the Evening (2005) (we might attribute the work’s relevance to its screening at three Thai galleries and six locations abroad since 2018). The connections between gallery exhibition and cinema inspires a discontinuous mapping of sound across the time zones of Thai politics. The article thusly builds a methodology of resonance across the aesthetic and cinematic space of Apichatpong’s work to highlight the role of sound in the illumination of time.

The film, The Wandering Earth (2019), is loosely based on the award-winning novelette by the same title by Liu Cixin, the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award in 2015, and it revealed China’s emerging soft power in the field of science fiction (hereafter SF), which has long been regarded as a Western-dominated genre. Along with the rapid technological development in Asia under neoliberal capitalism, China has recently emerged as one of the visible competitors for technological innovations while producing and consuming SF cultures through various kinds of media platforms. Acknowledging President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on “telling good China stories and spreading good China voices” in the age of globalization, nuanced research on contemporary Chinese SF films shifts the discourse of (re)producing the national and patriarchal representations of Chinese SF culture. In this regard, my research explores the complex entanglements between capitals, technologies, and state censorship in relation to SF representations of space/earth travel, rather than obsessing with a nationalist perspective in Chinese SF films. This paper analyzes the adaptation of The Wandering Earth while examining whether this film conforms to or deviates from the state guidelines. The paper, accordingly, addresses how the collective practice of “wandering” Asia imagined through the SF film relates to the Sinocentric world-building of the present and future. By focusing on the female character, Han Duoduo, who is newly adapted in the post-apocalyptic movie as an image of an orphan and a savior traveling from China to Indonesia, the paper focuses on the tensions between the Chinese national identity and hybrid embodiments beyond family structure, gender, and language. In doing so, this paper analyzes the female orphan character, Duoduo, as a political signifier that not only represents an alternative family structure of modern China but also reproduces a binary image of a woman embedded in Chinese patriarchal society. Moreover, this paper delves into the cinematic representation of a savior when Duoduo calls for global solidarity in tears by using the official Mandarin language. In terms of an exercise in cultural propaganda, I analyze how a unified Chinese language mobilizes transnational and multicultural individuals to participate in the China-centric order of mapping a new world/space. Ultimately, this paper explores various border crossing experiences of travelers across Asia in the SF film to re-imagine the geographical and geopolitical territories of Asia and to reconsider the multilingual and transcultural boundaries of Asia.

Ika Natassa as the author of the best-seller trilogy: ‘Divortiare,’ Twivortiare,’ and ‘Twivortiare 2,’ has taken benefits of, what Kattenbelt and Chapple (2006) explains as, intermediality for her works. When ‘Divortiare’ uses the traditional narrative by having long sentences, quoting dialogues, etc.; on the other hand, ‘Twivortiare’ and ‘Twivortiare 2’ use the collection of the twits and direct messages of the Twitter account of the main character to build the plot, setting, and the characters. She made accounts and twitted under the name of her novel main characters as the ‘Divortiare’ spin-off. To her surprise, @alexandrarheaw, the Twitter account of her novel’s main character, was followed by thousands of people. She even had conversations with Alexandra’s fans and built the story through it. This paper intends to peel the identity construction of metropolitan women in Ika Natassa’s trilogy novels. In the last decade, the lives of women in Asia have developed rapidly and dynamically. In many big cities in Asia, including Jakarta –the capital city of Indonesia, women have played modern gender roles and been exposed to technology. This development is portrayed by Ika Natassa in her novels: ‘Divortiare’, ‘Twivortiare’, and ‘Twivortiare 2′. Like other pop literature romance-themed novels, these trilogy novels bring about the life of Alexandra, a young divorcee banker, and her triangle love. Natassa does not only serves her reader with a complicated-yet-interesting love story between Alexandra – Beno – Denny, but she also depicts the family and work issues of women in the Asia metropolis. They are enticing to discuss since the construction of the identity of metropolitan women is intertwined between literature (as a form of media) and society. At first glance, this trilogy seems offering women empowerment issue since the main characters appears to bring the what Yulianeta (2021) mentions as modern gender roles. Yet, there is a leer that these modern gender roles attached on the novel are merely accessories to build the story and the plot, and to portray the lives of modern women in metropolis.

Conventionally, a world premiere happens once—with the premiere being a commodity chased by festivals that seek quantifiable exclusivity and “discoveries.” With the pandemic, film releases have been upended, with restrictions to virtual releases that include geo-blocking. This impacts not only financials and access but also fundamental questions of what a film is, and its proliferated existence as it is disseminated across platforms. Beyond cinematic moments that emphasize the intermixing of modalities and forms of media, intermediality understood as a spectrum of relations across media is not an inevitable but an innate destiny of cinema. In other words, cinema’s potential to transgress media boundaries and re-invent itself is made more visible under pandemic conditions that has intensified discourses on the material conditions of cinema. Still, contradictions remain between the bodily vulnerabilities of the people behind-the-scenes, the continued impingement of the national in film productions, as well as the tensions between in-person bodies and digital files as quarantine-able/encrypt-able/censor-able media. The main case study is Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s debut feature film Taste, which was shot in Vietnam from June 2019 to Sept 2019. Taste is a multi-region co-production by Vietnam, Singapore, France, Germany and Thailand with additional funding from Taiwan. Beginning from 2014, Taste participated in film initiatives and workshops in Vietnam, Singapore, France and Italy. This form of multi-year development, obtaining grants from government and private foundations across Asia and Europe, is becoming increasingly common among Southeast Asian independent filmmakers. Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged this model of filmmaking, which often requires international post-production in order to fulfil grant spending requirements. The post-production for Taste started in Thailand and France and finished in Cambodia. The film premiered twice without the filmmakers in attendance: first, virtually for jury, press, and industry in March 2021 at the Berlinale Film Festival’s Industry Event; and second, for the public at the unprecedented open-air Berlinale Summer Special in June 2021; and is banned in Vietnam while scheduled for a regionally-restricted release on the streaming platform, MUBI. From a scene in the film where characters in an isolated house hold onto a TV as they sing along to a song, to the navigation of national boundaries in its path to becoming a film—thinking intermediality through the example of Taste reveals how the bodies of spectators, creators, performers, and the film itself are cross-implicated in the conflicting worlds of a “world premiere.”

Over the past two decades, mass media as we knew them have been transformed by the global expansion of the digital. Yet a closer look at media histories in Southeast Asia muddies distinctions between the broad, resultant categories of “old” and “new” media. As I will show, throughout the Malay world in the early-mid 20^th century, a powerful mixture of audience expectations, formal and technological experimentation, market forces, and the need to localize transnational trends created a paradox of modernization: then-emergent technologies of representation like motion pictures appeared to be pulled backward in time by the magnetic draw of regional and local theatrical forms. The paradox only deepens from the perspective of the present, as the hauling “back” of film, and the opening and fragmentation it produced, anticipated the contemporary dismantling of established cinematic norms brought about by the proliferating screens, platforms and versions of the digital era. The explosion of Thai cinematic “versionists” from the 1930s-1970s is merely the most obvious example of this, regarding films not as fixed products, but as heterogenous collections of elements that can be “taken apart” and fundamentally altered during exhibition. In Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, and elsewhere in the region at the time, such cinematic adaptations were the rule rather than exception. The result, I argue, was an archipelagic “Malay” cinema premised on constant fracturing or “versioning” according to the dictates, styles and languages of public spheres in cities, villages, islands and other subnational locales. Closely reading key scenes from West Sumatran-Jakartan Usmar Ismail’s Lewat Djam Malam (After the Curfew 1954), I will show how this archipelagic approach draws on and develops intermedial understandings of cinema, while imagining the nation, its borders, and its “homogeneous empty time” as always already adulterated by local, regional and transnational flows.

In this paper, I explore the linkages made between a city-to-be, the still-unbuilt capital city of Amaravati in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and the fictional computer-generated urban spectacles of the popular Telugu fantasy film duology Baahubali, released over 2015 and 2016. In doing so, I hope to uncover the multiple ways in which discourses of technological and “Asian” futurity can be imaginatively welded to popular visions of Hindu nationalist pasts and futures. The planned capital city of Amaravati was linked to several international funders, especially the city-state of Singapore, whose vaunted urban planning firms were selected to produce the city’s masterplan. The city, it was hoped, would be a “world-class” replacement for the city of Hyderabad, which had been allotted to the neighboring state of Telangana after the state’s creation in 2013. However, upon seeing the proposed plans and designs by Singaporean firm Surbana Jurong and “starchitect” firms like Foster + Partners, then-chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu felt that Amaravati ought to be more reflective of “Indian” heritage. Naidu cited the fantastical (and completely computer-generated) urban landscape of Mahishmati—from the Baahubali films—as inspiration, and the planning committee reached out to director S.S. Rajamouli for consultation. This was met with round condemnation in the English-language press, with several architects writing into newspapers with withering critiques of both the megaproject and the committee’s decision to reach out to someone with no actual urban-planning expertise. Baahubali’s technical spectacle—which was central to the film’s marketing and success—was driven at a technical level by Silicon Valley giant AMD Technologies. Raja Koduri—then a senior VP at AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group—was also Rajamouli’s cousin, and integral to providing AMD hardware to Arka Technologies, the firm responsible for the Baahubali films’ visual effects production. Their technologies were put into service to render viable a fantastic (and fictional) story of Hindu kings and queens fighting amongst themselves to (re)establish seemingly just rule over their fictional territory and subjects. Reviews from Swarajya, a right-wing Hindu nationalist magazine, described the film’s technical prowess as essential to conveying the power and magnitude of the characters from Hindu epics, linking together the necessity of technical prowess to generating a worthy vision of the Hindu past and present. In this paper, I draw together these disparate elements—the familial linkages undergirding Telugu cinema and the presence of South Asians in Silicon Valley, the commoditization and marketing of Singaporean urban planning across the Global South, and the rise of high-production value Hindu fantasy films—to think through how a seemingly acceptable vision of contemporary Hindu nationalism is generated through complicated transnational, material, and imaginative linkages, across popular and mundane media forms.

“Culture isn’t just something [that’s] good for postcards or tourists. It provides meaning for our existence. Social memory never really dies. Even when you don’t know what that is, it will call to you.” In a December 2016 interview, Nadira Ilana, a Dusun filmmaker from the East Malaysian state of Sabah, frames Indigenous, Orang Asal culture as a dynamic, enduring force. She suggests that culture is imbued with history and endowed with the power to speak to the present. I take Nadira’s reflections as starting points for mapping how she and other Orang Asal creatives have answered this call. My paper examines a selection of contemporary Orang Asal film, art, and curatorial projects, illuminating the aesthetic choices, political contexts, and communal strategies that undergird them. I trace points of intersection and collaboration between creatives like Nadira Ilana, Shaq Koyok, and Pangrok Sulap, and curators such as Gerimis Art and the Borneo Arts Collective. In line with the goals of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements project and inspired by scholars like Kuan-Hsing Chen, my project is attentive to the regional forces and contexts that shape these artists and their work. I examine the different kinds of media platforms and communication strategies that have been central to creating art and fueling collaborations across (and despite) the political and geographic barriers that separate Peninsular and East Malaysia. In so doing, I argue that Orang Asal art and media in Malaysia are experiencing a cultural renaissance, one which is inherently relational and collaborative. Drawing on Daniel Heath Justice’s assertion that “relationship is the driving impetus behind the vast majority of texts by Indigenous writers,” this essay examines the kinds of relationships that structure the work of individual artists, shape collaborations between creatives and curators, and inform the ways in which Orang Asal cultural production is circulated.

Platformization has drastically intensified media flows. The immediacy and hyper-connectedness of multimedia platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Netflix render possible media convergence. In parallel, we, however, observe an underlying trend of media “deconvergence” (Jin 2011) in Asia, where geopolitics generates fragmentation, discontinuity, and decoupling in the transmission of media technologies and content. As a result, inter-Asia connections are constantly made and unmade, defying a linear progressive understanding of inter-Asia intermediality. This paper aims at providing a nuanced understanding of Inter-Asian media production in an age more connected yet divided than ever. Using the recent TikTok ban in India as a case study, it points to how notions of political partisanship undercuts the discourse of intermediality in Asia. We employ “techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to understand how “imagined communities” (Anderson 2006) live out, negotiate and articulate intermediality in a hyper-mediatized, but (digitally) territorialized, world. Drawing on content and discourse analyses of discussion threads on Reddit and Quora about the TikTok ban, the paper sets out to explore: how is TikTok perceived as a “Chinese” platform, as contrasted (and simultaneously integral) to, a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indianness”? Put differently, how does such a techno-nationalist standpoint ascribe “Chinese-ness” upon TikTok, both as a media platform and increasingly a new media format? And, finally, to what extent does techno-nationalism restrict and reshape inter-Asia media “flows” by constructing imagined digital territories?

Bringing the inter-media and inter-Asia together in a formulation for a conference elicits a unique tension not only between procedures and regions of inquiry. It anticipates a potential theoretical field in which technique and ecology animate a subjectivity and a practice that may no longer be recognizable by disciplines or norms of representation. This keynote contributes to a reflection on a reciprocal in-betweenness in the annotation of indigenous, civilizational, and pre-conquest form; contemporary art; and the curation of artist-curators. Included in this ensemble are the efforts of Carlos Villa and the gathering Other Sources: An American Essay (1976); Club Ate and the video trilogy Ex-Nilalang (2015); the 2019 Asian Art Biennale by Ho Tzu Nyen and Chia Wei Hsu titled The Strangers from beyond the Mountain and the Sea; Eisa Jocson’s Corponomy and The Filipino Superwoman Band series; and the work of Hu Yun on the diorama for the 2019 Singapore Biennale. Through this constellation, the aspiration is to reconceptualize Asia by enmeshing it in its intricate migrations and to prompt it to move beyond the co-production of modernities as it evokes another geopoetics of an intermedial locale.

In Liu Chuang’s three-channel video “Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities” (2018), decentralized networks of cryptocurrencies appear to amplify the inherent heterogeneity of the conceptually and regionally bounded entity known as Asia. Drawing upon James C. Scott’s work on zomia, the highland region connecting Southeast Asia, the People’s Republic of China, and the Indian subcontinent, the 40-minute video traces the historical tensions between Han Chinese state capital, private investors, and the lived experiences of ethnic minorities whose homes in remote mountainous areas offer cheap hydroelectricity that power the recent cryptocurrency craze. Paradoxically, a decentralized currency relies on centralized power and energy systems, which are in turn made possible by existing networks of railway and telephone infrastructures. My paper leverages Liu’s emphasis on infrastructural materiality in order to remedy what I see as intermediality’s tendencies to focus on information at the expense of energy and labor. Through an understanding of how currency, digital or otherwise, is also media—if not the historical medium that undergirds the production, circulation, and consumption of the more recognizable audiovisual media—we re-endow intermediality with its social character that is not limited to the technological. At the same time, the video’s focus on the historically exploitative extractions of natural resources re-grounds the concept of inter-Asia, which has highlighted the regional and sub-regional, in the earthly, global commons of the Anthropocene. I argue that the relation between intermediality and inter-asia will continue to be critically productive so long as both concepts tend equally to the materiality of centralized power and energy systems, as well as to the ephemerality of decentralized informational networks. Through the endangered Sino-Tibetan language of Muya that serves as the narrating voice-over, and titular field recordings from ethnomusicologists’ long interests in these minorities, “Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities” also reminds its viewers that crypto-mediums of exchange and circulation nonetheless leave audible traces.

This paper aims to investigate the inter-Asian and inter-medial cinematic journey of Phani Majumdar, an almost forgotten but truly transcultural filmmaker of colonial Asia who ventured filmmaking both in South and Southeast Asia during 1930s-60s. I propose to excavate Majumdar out of historical amnesia of Asian national cinemas. This paper is therefore a very first attempt to investigate the inter-Asian cinematic travel of and between South and Southeast Asia. Majumdar represents a classic ‘forgotten’ case here as he worked in multiple of Asian screen media industries during 1930s-60s.  I therefore aim in this paper to bring him out of such condensed ‘national’ and nationalist brackets by investigating how he has brought inter-Asian and inter-Medial filmmaking experiences and perspectives both in and from Mumbai and Malaya industries. Most of Majumdar’s films made in Calcutta and Mumbai constructed a romantic, popular vision of Indian nationalism on screen in the period before and after 1947—the partition and independence of India. Majumdar was invited to join Shaw Brothers’ studio in Singapore in the 1950s. Despite (or because of?) his inter-medial movement from Indian to Malayan film industry, here too he directed films with nationalist underpinnings. Malayan films such as Hang Tua and Anakku Sazali, both featuring the legendary star P. Ramlee were inter-Asian directorial ventures of Mazumdar in mid-1950s Singapore.  It is striking that Majumdar and his works were not much explored in Bengali and Hindi film discourses of Indian national cinema study. On the other hand, his filmic contributions were also not featured in Malaysian or Singapore film histories with due importance. Most histories of Southeast Asian cinemas bring forth his Malay-language films in a way as if he is a Malayan film-author whose works can be easily interpreted and positioned with/in a Malay nationalist framework. By unearthing Majumdar’s cinematic journey from Calcutta/Mumbai to Singapore/Malaya, I wish to interrogate the reasons why and how the filmic contributions of Majumdar—an itinerant inter-Asian film-author are largely absent and sidelined in Classical Indian film culture as well as Malayan cinema’s Golden Era. I wish to raise the question (and answer)—may this ‘invisibility’ and silencing of an inter-Asian like Majumdar be linked to the symptomatic inability of national(ist) historians of the national cinemas of South and Southeast Asia. The inter-Asian (let alone inter-medial) filmmakers are not well-suited in and for the histories of national cinemas—they create anomalies in the easy and direct relationships in between the nation (-state) and ‘national’ screen media industries. Here, by closely studying an inter-Asian, inter-Medial cultural producer like Majumdar, I aim to unpack such gaps and fissures in the narration of both South and Southeast Asian national cinemas.

One of the most exciting and pivotal moments in the history of early Thai cinema revolves around the event of film production and distribution of the arguably first feature film, Miss Suwanna of Siam (1923). It was actually a co-production between a filmmaking team from Universal Studio and local Thai talents mostly drawn from the royal court. Unfortunately, the celluloid of the film cannot be found either in Thailand or in the US. Despite this loss, printed magazines and official documents suggest many occasions of state intervention. One prominent case was the government’s request to ban the film from being screened in the US. On the one hand, the royal government’s initial goal to have the film promote the country demonstrates a deeply-rooted anti-colonialist and patriotic mentality as some critics stated that the film would represent Thais as different from the rest of “the colonized subjects in Asia.” On the other hand, the request to control the distribution emerges from the fear of cinema’s indexical potentials, and therefore, contradicting the popular desire of the Thais to represent themselves and to have their “places’ in the global circulation of cinema. This paper draws from this contradiction, and yet will add to the story a hitherto overlooked evidence–the one stating that the American director, Henry McRae, did not have any intention to create a new fictional story about Siam. In fact, learning that Vajiravudh would direct and act in his own staged play, Phra Ruang, McRae made a request to the royal court to simply film King Vajiravudh on stage. The fact that Miss Suwanna of Siam ended up being a melodrama composed completely anew and specifically for the international in lieu of the images of the King’s sacred play, underlines a very nuanced reservation and anxiety among the ruling class toward this new medium. I argue that for the ruling class of Siam to make sense of and take cinema back from the hand of the increasingly democratized masses, it is pivotal that they create a new aesthetic hierarchy. The residues of Miss Suwanna of Siam exemplify the new hierarchy and emphasize the classist mode of mediation not only between theatre and cinema but also between the royally trained acting and the peasant’s one. This paper eventually invites us to consider the emergent field of intermediality also in relation to the emergence of cinema and its early mode of circulation outside the Euro-American contexts.

This proposal forms part of my on-going ethnographic project on the Igorot or the collective identity of Indigenous peoples inhabiting the Cordillera region of the Philippines who are employed as domestic workers in Hong Kong. Focusing on three case studies of Igorot domestic worker vloggers and an analysis of select vlog content from their respective YouTube channels (Igorota Vlogger, EdRiLey SJ, igorot nanny) and supplementing these with my in-depth interviews with the creators/vloggers, I attempt to describe how YouTube as a social media platform provides a space for migrant and Indigenous articulations. Specifically, Igorot domestic worker vloggers attempt to “curate” their own idea of the “Igorot” and the “domestic helper” through an array of vlogging genres such as documenting their “everyday” life, uploading instructional “how to” videos, and covering various Igorot cultural activities in Hong Kong. Vlogging and its affective performances have also allowed these Indigenous migrant women to reclaim and recenter discourses surrounding their bodies such as the abjected and anthropologized Igorot on the one hand, and the suffering and sexualized Filipina migrant on the other. Such attempts to re-represent themselves have also shown other forms of Indigenous and migrant agency “documented” by these women such as the acquisition of “soft” and transferable skills of video editing, photography, and content management. Some have also highlighted how they have gained and sustained their own “followers/subscribers” who have learned from their videos and have also been “influenced” to work in Hong Kong. Others have also used their “platform” to correct misconceptions of the Igorot and the domestic helper they deem as discrimination and emphasize the “dignity” of both their labour and indigeneity. More significantly, these Indigenous migrant women have also attempted to reframe the “othered” Indigenous “savage” into a modern, cosmopolitan, and globalized subject of labour, aspiring for higher social mobility in countries that can offer permanent residency, even citizenship. Finally, these affective, spatial, and performative affordances of vlogging and its platform exploited by these Indigenous migrants show both the possibilities and consequences of “migrating” land-based indigeneity into the virtual.

Paying attention to cultural memory created through different forms of media practices, this paper explores a number of sites and mediators which generated memories of Hong Kong films in Thailand. The paper draws attention to different personal encounters to reflect on the shifting landscapes, technologies and socio-cultural contexts that shaped the connections between Thailand and Hong Kong over time. The threads across different platforms are discussed based on the shared question on what ‘Inter-Asian media convergence’ these media interactions create. Proposed sites to explore are: 1) The memory of Hong Kong films circulated as Thai dubbed versions: a distinctive tradition of dubbing started in the pre-home-video era when Sino-Thai identities were still marginalized in the Thai media, the dubbed Cantonese films were often stripped of its original cultural nuances with added jokes that reveal local situations and politically-incorrect racial remarks. Widely recognized as lowbrow comedy available at video rental stores across Thailand and now recirculated on YouTube, the dubbed versions reveal the cultural context of its time when inter-Asian connections were homogenized into national culture or marginalized as otherness. 2) The performative site-specific memory of Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss (1971): another segment of memory are the pilgrimage of international fans (mostly Anglo-European) who travelled to Pak Chong (100 miles north of Bangkok) – the town once used as the set for their favourite Hong Kong films. Instead of the national or regional preoccupation, the videos and writings shared online are framed through the global memory of Bruce Lee’s stardom and their own personal life stories. 3) The Cantonese connections of Thai cinephiles. This type of memory differs from the previous two as contributors sought to contextualize Hong Kong films within the diasporic and pan-regional memory of Hong Kong’s multimedia industry and star system. Amongst the writers who contributed to a special-issued magazine, an edited collection and Facebook communities is Krabi Kao Diew Dai (กระบี่เก้าเดียวดาย) who have been sharing archival finds and fond memories of the Hong Kong media world that spread to Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s until the era of Wong Kar-wai. The paper concludes with more recent memories of Hong Kong shaped by the shared repressive situations. These include projects such as Ten Years Thailand (2018) – modelled after the success of Hong Kong’s dystopian omnibus Ten Years (2015), the gathering for a talk on Joshua : Teenager vs Superpower (2018) by Amnesty International Thailand despite the suspension of the film screening and other participatory movements. These shifting platforms and audiences seem to suggest a transition from the nationalistic and globalized relations towards more regionally-shared sentiments.

Complicating Japan’s presumed cultural ownership of anime is its historical reliance on outsourced animation labor across Asia. Inter-Asian histories of subcontracted animation labor, alongside the transcultural production, circulation, and fan uptake of anime, donghua, manga, manhwa, and komiks demand a balanced analysis that recognizes cultural, historical and geopolitical specificity but also refutes claims to national ownership and cultural exclusivity. Scholarly consensus identifies Japan, South Korea, and China as central nodes in the intermedial regionalization of inter-Asian popular culture, while the United States is understood as the core of global English-language fan practices. Against this backdrop, I explore a two-fold approach to intermedial regionalization in a minor mode. First, Trese (2021), anchors my analysis of transnational animation in the Philippines, a minor node in comparison to East Asian or American hegemons. Second, I foreground a heterogenous continuum of Filipino/a/x artists and fans surrounding girls love (GL, yuri, baihe, lesbian komix), a queer transcultural genre of female homoerotic fiction. Enjoying less marketability and academic recognition than boys love (BL, yaoi, shounen’ai, danmei), girls love is a minor transcultural mode. Beyond representational content, its authors and fan communities are queer in the sense of confounding fixed identitarian coordinates of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, age, race, ethnicity, and religion. Hailed as the first Filipino animated series on Netflix, the detective-horror series Trese (2021), is an adaptation of a cult Filipino graphic novel with an androgynous heroine. Although publicity hyped its Filipino and Filipino American cast, writers, and producers (i.e., above-the-line “creatives”), most of its animation workers were not based in the Philippines. With a production company headquartered in Indonesia and Singapore and animation studios based in Los Angeles and Seoul, Trese reverses the Philippines’ history of below-the-line animation labor for Japanese and American animation companies. At the same time, Trese exemplifies Netflix’s attempt to become a global TV giant through international expansion and glocalization. Pivoting away from the formal economy of animation labor and media giants, this talk also looks at subcultural creators and informal economies of fan labor. I consider Ligaw-Tingin (2018), a Philippine anthology of queer women komix artists, alongside online fan communities like Yuri/GL PH on Facebook and Filipino translations of Japanese shōjo manga on bootleg aggregator sites. Recalling the penumbral quality of devalued outsourced labor in the global offshore economy, creator economies and fan labor are often overlooked despite their crucial role in ensuring the circulation of queer media (via promotion of foreign and local artists and titles, fan conventions, fan talk, and unlicensed uploads and scanlations). If language differences are a barrier to media globalization and regionalization in key geocultural markets, then localized transcultural flows depend on the multilingual competencies and intercultural knowledge of both fans and authors.

In colonial British Malaya, mediatic thinking was contiguous with emergent conceptualizations of coloniality in dispersed geographies—imaginaries made possible by the peculiarities of the forested landscapes that they sought to govern. During the Malayan Emergency, a counterinsurgency war from 1948 to 1960 fought between the colonial British administration in Malaya and counter-imperial leftist forces, Malaya’s rainforests and its hinterlands were militarized through the building of communications media networks. Nontheatrical film screenings, mobile film units, and wireless radio were part of a material network of “enmeshed infrastructures” that included the building of new villages, military forts, electrical grids and other networks designed to entangle forest ecologies within expanding technologies of colonial statecraft. While the colonial government filled the air with wireless signals and lit up the night sky with film shows however, what they did not realize was that the forest was already part of other mediatic systems—environmental, Indigenous, and that of other possible Asias. From spirit mediums to root fungi, forests are their own mediatic infrastructures, with messaging systems, feedback loops, and networks of communication that enmesh the human, non-human, and elemental in polymorphic ways. Recent theoretical approaches in media environment studies (e.g. John Durham Peters, Jussi Parikka, Nicole Starosielski, Rafico Ruiz, Melody Jue) have called for expanded definitions of media and mediation beyond our 20^th and 21st century understandings of technological communications media (e.g. film, television, Web 2.0, radio) to argue that environment—air, water, soil, and much more—are also media. As John Durham Peters reminds us, “Medium has always meant an element, environment, or vehicle in the middle of things.” My work locates the concept of “intermediality” at the intersection of colonial film/media and that of the forest itself as a mediatic environment. My field research in Indigenous and Chinese resettlement villages in Perak show how intermedial forests were subject to counter-colonial forms of engagement aligned with alternative ways of imagining Asia—a “pluriverse” of Many Asias amidst the infrastructural landscape of late coloniality.

As a Malaysia-born film star who sojourns in Hong Kong and America most of the time, Michelle Yeoh has demonstrated a shift of her public persona to goodwill mobilizations in recent years. In 2016, Yeoh was assigned as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Goodwill Ambassador and has engaged in a range of ecological, gender, and human rights causes both globally and in Southeast Asia. That said, her ambassadorial image advances a presence navigating across the Southeast Asian borders while problematizing the myth of the rising Asia in global politics that dominates the discourse of transnational stardom. The new publicity appears particularly intriguing as it is situated in discrete yet interconnected media space spanning from cinema to websites and social media. Premised that intermediality is a concept, which intervenes in the theorization of star-making, this essay seeks to investigate Yeoh’s potent and ambivalent goodwill persona in the intraregional, digitally-mediated context and how such persona interrogates the boundary of Asia and global. This analysis adopts Yeoh’s 2018 visit to a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar as a point of departure. It posits media narratives recalibrated Yeoh’s Malaysian lineage and ushered a sense of affinity to Rohingya’s displaced communities who fled Myanmar to Bangladesh seeking asylum in 2017. The symbolic rapport of the visit, nevertheless, perplexed Yeoh’s screen personality in the Hollywood 2011 The Lady, a biopic of Myanmar’s democracy campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was criticized for remaining silent toward the military’s crackdown on the Rohingya ethnicity in reality. Yeoh’s equivocal persona is further complicated by her explicit expression of support on Twitter for protesters in Myanmar’s turmoil in 2021. By delineating the intertextual nuances, this essay contends Yeoh’s altruic imaginary displays a fissure to her celluloid appeal, suggesting the dynamic and fluid kind of star currency that flows across geographical, discursive, and media configurations. Such phenomenon disrupts the frameworks of understanding Asian celebrities, which are chiefly regionally-bound (such as Japanese or South-Korean icons) or platform-specific (like “wanghong” in Chinese Internet). Through the reading of primary materials of feature films, online media reports, and Twitter posts, this essay pursues to achieve two goals: first, expanding the literature of Michelle Yeoh that is dominated by efforts of exploring her Hong Kong or transnational image in the rhetorics of globalization and the Asia-global polemics; second, shedding new light of crisscrosses of celebrity culture and inter-Asia critique in today’s cultural and technological junctures.

How might one convey the colonial legacies and ongoing ecological impact of development in Singapore and Hong Kong? In this paper, I examine how my creation of a decolonial, digital archive of sound recordings, artist and writer interviews and readings, video clips, and short films attempts to wrestle with the hyper-development of these two Asian cities. Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant from Canada, “Intertidal Polyphonies” seeks to explore new aspects of the environmental humanities in Asia, and develop public-facing critique and scholarship about these spaces. In particular, I consider what roles collaboration, sound, and polyphony might play in the affective depiction of Asian cities in flux, connecting Singapore and Hong Kong in profound yet unexpected ways. My work turns to sound, resonance, listening, and acoustemology as ways in which to understand these deep traces of intertidal histories, development, and infrastructure but also to communicate them to a larger audience. I seek to theorize the assemblage of recordings that I have made of the acoustic realities of sand dredging, construction, tides, and changing ecosystems. How best as well to consider the voices of the writers and artists working in these contexts? “Intertidal Polyphonies” draws from a theorization of sound as both a framework and a methodology for inquiry and knowledge mobilization. Jacques Attali (1977) muses that “more than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies” (6). Indeed, he posits that “the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but it is audible” (3). Numerous scholars like Jean-Luc Nancy (2002) and Veit Erlmann (2010) have written about the singularity and power of sound to transcend time and space while paradoxically grounding the listener in place. Further, writing about an assemblage-ecological sense of sound, Georgina Born (2019) notes how sound has “is both coproduced nonhumanly… yet also transubstantiates perceptually, affectively, and culturally into human experience… [and] acts on the human rather than merely being modulated by the human” (187). While these theorizations have arisen from Euro-American contexts, recent work by Rey Chow and Pooja Rangan (2019) has opened the way to consider how much more needs to be done in terms of contextualizing and understanding the possibilities of inter-Asian work in sound recordings and objects.

In March 2020, K-pop boy group NCT 127 released “Kick It,” a Bruce Lee-themed music video showcasing a pastiche of Oriental/ist aesthetics from gold-embroidered suits and dragon tapestries to Japanese-garden round window interiors and cyberpunk Hong Kong neon street façade exteriors. Spectacularly fusing its heavy-metal bass line and fast rap with a hip-hop choreography punctuated with kung-fu high kicks, the music video seems to profess, as Bruce Lee’s films once did, an empowered cosmopolitan image of “cool” Asian culture that throws off its Sick-Man-of-Asia past, echoed in the lyrics’ repetition of “no more trauma”. As the song marked a new peak in K-pop’s global (read: American) popularity, however, Chinese netizens have been quick to call out its gratuitous instrumentalization of Chinese cultural influences, a deliberate blurring of (what they consider) specifically Chinese origins into an ambiguously pan-East-Asian appeal that is strategically present in K-pop’s quest for world popularity. This paper situates “Kick It” and the debates it raises over heritage and authenticity in the ongoing culture wars between China and South Korea in the recent decades, those about Chinese New Year and Lunar New Year, hanfu and hanbok, Dragon Boat Festival and Gangneung Danoje, etc. Not only do accusations of Korean cultural appropriation in popular Chinese online discourses reveal larger anxieties about nationalist identity and the role “soft power” plays in the global economy, they also speak to China’s precarious positionality in the supposedly collective struggle of minor Asian culture(s) against the hegemonic structures imposed by the first world. Taking into account NCT (Neo Culture Technology)’s marketing concept of “infinite expansion” across the world, I push for an understanding of culture as technology through a textual analysis of the music video’s remediation of Bruce Lee’s cinematic legacies into flat and inhuman hyperreal CGI simulations. Like the digital technologies it employs, “Kick It”’s postmodern self-fashioning of intra-East-Asian elements into a cosmopolitan blend of Orientalism, I argue, presents culture as a plastic sign available for imitation, competition, and ultimately sale in the neoliberal capitalist circuit, dispelling myths about an original or authentic cultural “locale” available for representation to begin with. By engaging with Tina Campt’s definition of adjacency as “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability” and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “speaking nearby,” I hope to bring a more nuanced discussion into popular and academic critiques of cultural appropriation that take into account the shifting dynamics of power from and to its sites of production and reception.

This paper argues that Cheng Xinhao’s intermedial project, Strange Terrains (2013-Present), offers a non-civilizational account of the Mangs: the unrecognized ethnic nomadic community moving between the hilly borders of Yunnan (Southwest China) and Lai Châu (Vietnam). Strange Terrains comprises of three artistic streams – (i) ‘Hunting: A Contemporary Knowledge Form’ (a photographic, infra-red imaging, and multi-channel video installation that documents the hunting practices of the contemporary Mang) (ii) ‘The production of Borderlands’ (photographs videos, counter maps, installations, etc. which look at how the Mang’s cross the China-Vietnam border on an everyday, lived basis), and (iii) ‘Silver…. And Other Elements’ (scrapbook installations, photo and video work that look at the incursions of silver and other extractive capitalism regimes into the mountain borderlands, in the process colonizing the Mangs.) Cheng’s work illustrates what I define as noncivilizational media: the lived experiences, habits, crafts – in a word, technicities – of ethnic or minority communities, the “noncivilized” of the Zomian region. Strange Terrains, I argue, is not only set in the Zomian region – a mountain-forest shatter zone spanning East, South, and Southeast Asia (Schendel 2002, Scott 2009) that the Mangs inhabit, but also follows the Zomian noncivilizational ethic. It documents their everyday practices of hunting (as opposed to settled irrigated farmland), evasion of extractive industries (for nomadic livelihoods), and a casual irreverence for national boundaries that the Mangs use to hold the forces of state, civilizational progress, and capital at bay. Further, I maintain that Cheng’s work not only documents noncivilized lives, but, as a Han Chinese closely working with the Mangs, he also imbues a noncivilizational aesthetic and ethic in his ethnographic practice. I focus on his video I Want to Make a Film (2017), where he primarily records the everyday methods of building a fire, hunting, making thatched roofs in the forests, etc. which is a standard, colonial ethnographic practice. However, he interjects these scenes with wry, humorous intertitles during his dialogues with Mang collaborators, focusing on how ethnographic appearances are also labor (requiring repeated performances of hunting or building huts across rugged terrains). He also films their complaints and final refusal to film (any further) in the night. I conclude that Cheng’s work proposes a noncivilizational media practice in a dual sense: both as the documentation of noncivilized lives, and as a decolonizing ethnographic practice which incorporates the Mang’s presence and consequent refusal to be filmic subjects.

South Korean writer Han Kang’s novel Human Acts, a provocative testimony of the Gwangju massacre and simultaneously a lyrical rumination on how to narrate the event, is much different from her former one The Vegetarian, which brought her a global reputation. This study seeks to read Human Acts as a literary product of the postmemory generation based on the author’s confession of the encounters with the two photographs, which in this essay will be interpreted as moments of transmission of trauma. It argues that the novel’s aesthetic characteristics of intermediality and intertextuality should be taken into consideration in order to grasp the various types of trauma transmission in the novel. Having started her literary career as a poet, Han has interwoven her textual practices encompassing poetry, novels, and video art. Given the extensive scope of her artistic practices, I will take up Han’s endeavor to articulate the traumatic event with diverse ways of utterance, and how she achieves her goal through the novel’s aesthetic forms based on rich intertextuality. Regarding her series of poems Winter beyond the Mirror as the indivisible complements to the novel, this study traces a transliguistic procedure of intertextuality constituted by photography, poetry, and a polyphonic novel in Han’s project as well as the intertextuality of post-traumatic spacetime and post-traumatic subjectivity.  According to Marianne Hirsch, postmemory experienced as a belated encounter with the trauma of the past is constructed ‘by means of the stories, images, and behavior among which they grew up.’ Thus, this paper will dwell on the various media of intergenerational transmission of trauma including the photographs, the videos, hearsay, and fragments of overheard dialogue. I will conclude by discussing the author’s aesthetic strategy of polyphony in terms of imagining communality among the multiple voices of Gwangju. By adopting a narrative strategy using polyphony of voices, each of which embodies, disembodies, and unearths the (im)possibility of a statement of traumatic violence, the novel thereby creates a space of text charged with a sense of textual communality while depicting the birth and violent demise of the Gwangju Commune.

On the 9^th of August 2019, Singaporeans celebrated their 54th National Day. The veteran rock star, Ramli Sarip, known throughout the Malay Peninsula as “Papa Rock” led the singing of Singapore’s national anthem Majulah Singapura (Onwards Singapore). The former frontman of Malay band Sweet Charity infused the anthem with his raspy and seasoned folk-rock vocals. His rendition become a viral internet hit and was later re-recorded, produced and released as a polished music video. Majulah Singapura is significant because it is sung in Malay – one of the state’s many official languages – by a majority population that do not speak the language. Thus, this anthem has always afforded a stake by minority Malay-Singaporeans to the nation’s (ethno)cultural identity. This paper examines the intermediated responses to popular music in the public sphere that inadvertently reveals the ethnopolitical tensions and reconciliations of Singapore with its surrounding (ethnic and linguistic) Malay region. Ramli’s ethnic identity and distinctly Malay (rock) voice in singing the anthem ignited public debates about how Singapore interprets its multicultural national identity. Negative responses to his performance were quickly reported in news media in neighbouring Malay-majority Malaysia, where Ramli is a household name, further highlighting cross-border tensions concerning race. This paper considers the negative and ambivalent public reactions to Ramli’s version of the anthem and the ensuing media narrative that unfolded. In doing so, it draws attention to the racial politics of Singapore that emerge from the subtext of netizen comments and news headlines that responded to Ramli’s live performance and consequent music video. These discourses are analysed in light of the island-state’s geopolitical history as surrounded precariously by a largely Malay-speaking region. The paper reveals that intermediated expressions of popular culture provide a means to ‘rock’ the foundations of the Singaporean state’s often obscured subtextual narratives of ethnonationalism.

Mobilizing the genres of the musical and the melodrama, Kiếp Hoa [Life of a Flower] (1953) and Song Lang (2018) bespeak a nostalgic love for song and performance that resonates in Viêt Nam and the diaspora today, celebrating as they do a notoriously hybrid and highly popular opera form called cải lương. These films, I argue, offer a baroque window onto which the landscape of migration was studded with deeply-felt sentiments of exile; in so doing, they reverberate with a kind of southern Vietnamese affect born of a historically-situated sense of displacement and persecution and thus build on a cinematic archive that interlinks the fleeing of with the feeling for a culturally vibrant southern Viêt Nam. In contrast to the documentary-style imagery that persistently captures and petrifies terrified Vietnamese refugees in flight, in their extravagence, these films evince a queer, feminist, and critical sensibility that coalesces around the highly gendered figure of the refugee. In tracing the production and the circulation of these films, of their makers and performers and their refugee lines of flight, I contend that a Critical Refugee Studies (CRS) method of analysis functions most insightfully to center refugees in popular culture and to ascertain the filaments of joy and loss, of refugee memories and critiques, that are threaded within them. This mode of looking, as my co-writers and I argue in Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies, is an allowance for “the worlds of refugees to be evident, on their own terms.” The task of the CRS scholar, then, is to map out the circuits of creativity and criticality that come into view in refugee works and explore the epistemological and worldmaking practices that inhere in them. As such, the fascinating stories behind the refugee movements of the directors and actors of Life of a Flower and Song Lang informs the critical apparatus which I interrogate the circulation of refugee affects within both the texts and paratexts of Vietnamese films.

After twelve years of operation in a village in Hunan Province, China, “Voice of Malayan Revolution (Suara Revolusi Malaya),” the clandestine radio station of the Malayan Communist Party in exile, was closed down on June 30, 1981. Its termination was ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who pushed for the neoliberal “economic reform and open up” policy under the pressure of Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, who requested that “China stop supporting communist armed struggles in Southeast Asia.” While it was still active, “Voice of Malayan Revolution” was broadcast widely in four languages: Mandarin, Malay, English, and Tamil. Various Chinese dialects were also added, for instance Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew. The station’s multilingual programs were translated, edited and aired by a staff of 100 members, multi-ethnic Malayan revolutionaries including Chinese, Malay and Indians, who collaborated with Chinese technicians. VMR broadcasts not only invigorated guerilla fighters in the jungle, but also appealed to innumerable communities in Southeast Asia and idealistic youths in mainland China. Taking VMR as an example, this paper examines how radio as an auditory technology and a medium for “disembodied voices” facilitated an “acoustic revolutionary internationalism” that defied linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries and established intimate emotional and intellectual connections with spatially distant and dispersed listeners. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which the history and practices of VMR epitomize key shifts in geopolitical and historical relations between China, Southeast Asian nations, and old and new colonial powers during and after the Cold War period.

Since 2012, Ho Tzu Nyen has been working on The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, an ongoing meta-project driven by the heterogeneity of​ the region known as “Southeast Asia” – an area that has never been unified by language, religion or political power. Taking the form of an “Abécédaire” of the region, the project sets out to re-imagine alternative delineations of the regions through a series of biographies, concepts and motifs, embodied in figures such as tigers, gongs, double agents. This resulted in a number of projects focused on particular terms within the Dictionary, such as “G for Ghost / Ghostwriter / Gene Z. Hanrahan” or “T for Tiger”. These projects were manifested across different mediums and disciplines such as theatrical performances (Ten Thousand Tigers, 2014 and The Mysterious Lai Teck, 2018), musical concerts (The Song of the Brokenhearted Tiger, 2013), video installations (One or Several Tigers, 2017), found footage films (The Nameless, 2015 and The Name, 2015) virtual reality experiences (R for Resonance, 2018). In 2017, Ho Tzu Nyen presented CDOSEA, an attempt to think and work through the Dictionary as a whole, by creating a system that generates relationalities and resonances between all the terms gathered in the project. The CDOSEA is an audio-visual “Abécédaire” made up of materials detourned from online sources and recomposed in endless variations, in “real-time” by algorithms created in collaboration with Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert (0 x 2620).  Described as a  platform facilitating ongoing research, a matrix for generating future projects and an oracular montage machine, the CDOSEA is available for free access at https://cdosea.org. In this presentation, Ho Tzu Nyen will share some of the processes and strategies from this  multi-part project, while focusing on a number of terms from the Dictionary that might in themselves, already be “ intermedia” and “inter-asia”. Akin to an organism, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) is part of an ongoing project that grows, generates and provides critical insight into the pluralistic definitions of the territories under this nomenclature.

“Localism” (本土) has been a key word in the discourse of Hong Kong that indicates efforts to configure a unique sense of local identity and history. While unspecified in English, “localism” in Chinese, 本土, which is a combination of 本 (origin) and 土 (earth), highlights a land-oriented mentality. Certainly, the issue regarding land is at the core of everyday struggles among the locals, who must make ends meet in a highly urbanized city with the most expensive housing in the world. Yet, this focus on land obscures the understanding of the history and culture Hong Kong in relation to the ocean. After all, other than the land border connecting the city to China, Hong Kong is oceanic in the sense that it is a peninsula with a constellation of islands facing an open sea. This paper attempts to assess the possibility of mapping the discourse of Hong Kong in the existing oceanic and island studies by focusing on two documentaries about the rediscovery of Cantonese singing traditions in two local outlying islands. In Ballad of the Shore (岸上漁歌) and Rhymes of Shui Hau (水口婆浪的山歌), both released in 2017, Ma Chi-hang and Fredie Chan tell two stories about folk songs sung by farmers and fishermen in two coastal villages in Lautau Island (大嶼山) and Tap Mun Island (塔門). Coincidentally, these two documentaries both feature the filmmakers’ painstaking process of understanding and transcribing the mountain songs (山歌) and fishermen’s songs (漁歌), sung in Weitau Wa (圍頭話) and Shui Wa (水話), which are two diminishing varieties of Hong Kong Cantonese. Inspired by Huang Yu-ting’s discussion of the positionally of Taiwan literature in terms of archipelagos as well as Brian Bernards’ interrogation of the South Seas and the convergence of diasporic and native cultures in China and Southeast Asia, I aim to situate my examination of the media about Hong Kong Cantonese island singing traditions in the oceanic network of different regions in Asia, illuminating the intricate problem concerning who is the local/native/indigenous Cantonese in Hong Kong.

Two decades ago, at precisely the same moment “intermediality” and “inter-Asia” began to enter the critical lexicon, the Filipina art historian Alice Guillermo evaluated the proliferation of films about Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in the 1990s as visual attempts “to give an artistic and emotional unity to a tragic experience with which many people empathize” (107). While films about the OFW experience predate this period, Guillermo importantly calls our attention to the consolidation of the genre against the historical backdrop of inter-Asian labor contradictions and crises in the ‘90s. Focusing exclusively on the spate of Filipino films dramatizing the high-profile cases of actual Filipina contract workers “in extremis” (100) laboring elsewhere in Asia, like Flor Contemplacion (Singapore), Maricris Sioson (Japan), and Sarah Balabagan (UAE), Guillermo’s well-known account generatively attends to the uneven characterization, nationalist sentimentality, and political instrumentalization of this first wave of “OFW visual culture.” Missing from Guillermo’s account, however, is the crucial recognition that all of the films she analyzes are in fact cinematic adaptations of stories that first circulated in myriad media and discursive forms throughout Asia—television, newspaper, radio, policy reports, etc. Historicizing this origin story of “OFW visual culture,” now more than thirty years old, my essay develops the concept of “transmedial migration” as an attempt to ground Irina O. Rajewsky’s notion of “medial transposition” (51) within the historical specificity of Filipino reproductive workers’ expanded, but subordinated circulation throughout the region at the beginning of the so-called “Asian century.” Just as Filipino reproductive labor becomes transnational in its out-migration, so too does charting the decades-long history of “OFW visual cultures” reveal another type of migration: a transmedial one, in which OFW narratives move through different media forms, each with new horizons of possibility and structural limits. Furthermore, given that so many of these media texts are produced by non-Filipino Asians (e.g. Singaporean, Japanese, and Korean cultural producers), this essay interrogates the collective reproduction of “OFW visual cultures” as a uniquely inter-Asian mode of mediatic representation. Departing from the real-life adaptations of the 1990s and their sentimentalist derivatives like Rory Quintos’s Anak (2000) and Chito S. Roños Caregiver (2008), this essay first examines the rise of economic allegory in the OFW horror films from early 2000s (Kelvin Tong’s The Maid [2005], Chito S. Roño’s Sukob [2006], and Yam Laranas’s The Echo [2008]). It then turns to the festival-circuit social realism of films from the 2010s (Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo [2013], Hannah Espia’s Transit [2013], and Zig Dulay’s Bagahe [2017]) and Sung-A Yoon’s art-house documentary Overseas (2019), as a means to locate this shift from earlier sentimental or fantastic visual forms to “semiperipheral realist” ones as the inauguration of OFW visual cultures “transmedial migration” into autobiographical, autofictional, and interactive epistolary forms made possible by platform mediatization within the OFW diaspora. Examining the contemporary proliferation of OFW vlogging and video content production on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok, this essay ends with an evaluation of the new digital autonomies and foreclosures for OFW narratives signaled by this uniquely 21st-century, inter-Asian remediation of life writing into livestreaming.

This paper considers the warehouse (and cinematic and artistic representations of the warehouse) as a space of intermedial potential. In the first part of the paper, I consider Amazon’s arrival in Asia as a multi-platform site that has shaped new practices of media consumption through its digitization and distribution of media throughout the region. In the second part of the paper, I examine representations of the factory and the warehouse as spaces of creativity and potential in media objects as diverse as Chloe Zhao’s docu-fiction Nomadland (2020), Cao Fei’s video works Whose Utopia? (2006) and Asia One (2018), and Corrie Chen’s short film Tinseltown (2016). The warehouse facilitates the trans-border exchange of goods (specifically, media), yet these flows are uneven in their distribution. It has been embraced by local centres at the same time as it has been met with resistance, both in industrial and political terms and through artistic practice. This paper explores how intra-Asian imaginations of the warehouse visualise new forms and processes of digital and creative labour that both dis-intermediate but also re-mediate assemblages of intermedial potential.

In 1996, one of Taiwan’s most sampled music recordings also incited one of the world’s most well-known copyright controversies. Performed by Difang Duana and Igay Duana, the “Elders’ Drinking Song” is a traditional chant of the indigenous Falangaw Amis People. It was first recorded by Changhui Xu in 1978, catalogued by the French government in 1989, sampled by the German music group Enigma in 1993, and used for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics commercials. It later appeared in many more commercials, films, and TV shows, all of which aired without acknowledgement. With the help of the Han Chinese, however, the indigenous Amis people eventually brought the case to court and ended with a favorable settlement. Known as the 1996 Atlanta Incident in Taiwan, this event opened new conversations about Taiwan’s identity and its position in the world. Among them, however, the indigenous discourse was often overshadowed by conversations on intellectual property and cultural commodity. Its inter-Asian connections among ethnic groups are also often overshadowed by its global circulation. Throughout the 1990s, other indigenous music artists such as Kulilay Amit (A-Mei) were caught between two nationalist narratives. In Sinophone studies, recent scholarship began to reconstruct a global indigenous discourse from Taiwan. In this paper, I examine such discourse in Duana’s recording. Despite its global reach, I argue that the intermedial circulation of the recording creates a space for thinking indigeneity as an inter-Asian relationship between different peoples and their occupancy of the land. I contend that: sound does not operate as a free-floating entity transcending continental boundaries; instead, sound maps inter-Asian geographical traces and spatial experiences of border, migration, and indigeneity.