Modality Company

Dear SJ,

Five years ago, I created this piece for your Directing and Composition module during the time of University of Sussex, at a moment when the world seemed to change overnight.

As someone who grew up under the one-child policy, solitude has never felt daunting to me. During that period, being isolated actually gave me time and space to observe what was happening on this tiny island: lockdown rules changing, people's attitudes about vaccines, the Black Lives Matter movement extended from the States, conspiracy theories around COVID-19, rising hostility towards Asians, and the sudden acceleration of virtual reality and digital life... God there's countless!

What struck me wasn’t only how radically different people’s perspectives could be, depending on context and translation, but also how quickly certain narratives were being fixed, recorded, and circulated — while others quietly disappeared. What can be said and what cannot. 

That was when I began to feel, very concretely, the power of the archive. As our beloved Foucault puts it, “The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” Looking back now, I realise that Interval(2020) was never really about isolation in the romantic sense. It was more about being present inside a system that was constantly deciding what counted as visible, meaningful, or recordable. During COVID, so much of life was reduced to screens, data, and official statements. What couldn’t be translated into those forms — subtle emotions, contradictions, moments of uncertainty — often fell outside the 'camera frame'.

That’s probably why I chose to perform mostly outside the camera frame. Leaving the radio visible, while my body remained fragmented or absent, felt instinctive at the time. I didn’t want to fully “explain” myself to the camera. I wanted the work to acknowledge that something was happening, like the geometric shape drawn on my torso (I learned about this word for the first time when reading your review ;) while refusing to offer a complete image. In hindsight, I see this as a quiet resistance to the idea that everything meaningful must be captured, documented, or made legible.

Standing alone on the Sussex Coast also carries a different weight for me now. The almost surreal landscape colour and lighthouse in the background often associated with borders, with watching, with the idea of an island looking outward but also guarding itself. During the pandemic, that feeling intensified. I was physically present, yet often aware of how easily certain bodies could become hyper-visible as targets. Therefore, at that time, I always changed my hair colour and wore baseball cap and sunglasses on the street. 

Five years later, I think Interval speaks less about a specific historical moment and more about a question that still feels unresolved: who gets to decide which stories matter enough? And what happens to the stories that don’t fit neatly into existing system category?

The piece doesn’t try to recover those missing stories, nor does it attempt to speak for them. Instead, it leaves space — pauses, gaps, off-frame moments — as a reminder that absence itself carries meaning. Not everything that matters can be documented, and not everything undocumented is insignificant.

Perhaps that’s what I value most about the work now. It holds an interval — between presence and disappearance, between personal and collective memories — without trying to close it. Who knows, after five years, I will probably give all of these grandiliquence a laugh. But what never change is, you are the one who once yelled at me and changed my life, 'Ming! DON'T APPLY FOR FILM SCHOOL! You are an artist, not a cameraman!' 

Yours with love,

Ming

14 Dec 2025