One of the most exciting parts of moving into our new place in the SF Chronicle building was our new neighbors. We looked forward to the time to when we could begin to work together, collaborate and basically ‘hang out’ with each other. Creative sparks will fly!
We recently welcomed artist Mike Lai to our digital SF green screen + stage where he spent the day working on his latest big piece. Mike is working with out next-door-neighbors at Intersection for the Arts – one of the Bay Area’s oldest art organizations.
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I am creating a fine art video about Immigrants’ journey to the U.S. through the water. Specifically, the project will reinterpret a tragic event of immigrants smuggling across the Niagara River from Ontario to New York in 1988. The incident ended with the death of all passengers, including a six year old girl.
The video will capture passengers in a raft struggling through whitewater. It will devoid of all scenic setting and background, only props and performers. It will focus on performers simulating a raft moving down a river by pulling, pushing and hauling it in mid-air. Not only will they emulate the movement of whitewater, just as the water can transport or take you under, they will push, pull and flip the raft and the passengers within to create the tension between life and death, triumph and failure of the journey.
The final presentation of the video will be a projected installation for the Intersection for the Arts 5M gallery next door to the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. The scale will be large, similar to 18th century French heroic paintings, and so will the composition of the shot and the style of post-production work. The project is experimental in nature. So, I will explore different performance strategies and camera work during the shoot.
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Who is Mike Lai?
Mike Lai is a multimedia performance artist based in San Francisco. He received his B.A. from Davidson College, NC and M.F.A. from SF Art Institute. His work has been exhibited nationally, including Queen’s Nails Annex Gallery and Southern Exposure. He has been invited to perform at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival and Washington Square Park in San Francisco, which he received an Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2007.
Much of Lai’s work is large-scale performance that explores the relationships between Asian identities and the media. He utilizes references from film, history, literature and popular culture as a way to examine and raise questions around how people negotiate their identities and the ones created by the media. Often times, his work also develops into sculpture, video and photography.
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We hope to see the finished video by mid-May. Until that time, you can check out this rough video sketch to get an idea of what it will look like. We’ll post the finished project once Lai gives us the OK.