At Ob/Scene Festival, Ho Rui An introduces two films Lining and Student Bodies along with the lecture performance The Economy Enters the People.
Lining begins with the movement of Shanghai’s cotton mills to Hong Kong on the eve of the Communist takeover and extends into the Reform era during which Hong Kong’s industrial base would in turn be displaced to the mainland. The work traces the material networks that connected Hong Kong to the mainland long before the official launch of China’s economic reform; it also depicts the transformation of Hong Kong from an industrial to a financial hub.
Student Bodies approaches the fraught history of capitalist modernity in Asia through the figure of the student body. Ho Rui An considers the student body as a figure that stands in for the body politic of the region across the successive periods of “miraculous” development, crises and recoveries through to the present day. The “star capitalist pupil” of the United States, as Chalmers Johnson said of Japan in the postwar period, becomes in the next moment, the dead student protester on the streets. At every historical turn, the student body reincarnates as a different form, exploding established analytical frameworks based on class, culture, or the nation-state.

Lining
Co-commissioned by CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong; Guangdong Times Museum Media Lab, Guangzhou; and PinchukArtCentre, Kiev
Concept, direction & edit: Ho Rui An
Sound: Zai Tang

Student Bodies
Commissioned by Asian Film Archive, Singapore
Concept, direction & edit: Ho Rui An
Sound: Zai Tang