"Though Another" - PANDAS ARE PANDAS: Yuchi Ma, Closing Screening

Through Another brings together moving image works that explore how identity, memory, and belonging are shaped through proxy. Spanning animated rituals, speculative archives, and personal mythologies, these works explore the porous boundaries between self, home, and nationhood. A panda, a pig avatar, a fish bone, a mouth-shaped glyph, a lake named Perfect, among other surrogate figures, each mediation bears witness to experiences that are not always nameable. Across these works, the familiar becomes uncanny, language flickers, and the personal shifts toward the allegorical; the program reflects on how we come to know ourselves through what stands in our place.

List of Artists/Works:

* Leming Chung

* My Doctor’s Prescription for my pollen allergy is to let the light illuminate everywhere (9min08s, 2020)

*This is a three-character monologue about be-ing, bee, and bees. As the lines between the body, self and the external world blur,  we are left to ponder the potential transformation of their internal conflict. It poses the question of how the internal struggles of beings will evolve in a world where boundaries are no longer distinct. What shape of the politic will this take, and how will it ultimately manifest? It is a contemplative exploration of the fluidity of identity and the interplay between the individual’s internal body and the external collective.

* Zhengyang Huang + Zhengzhou Huang

* Digital Twin (1min54s)

* Digital Twin begins with an exploration of our experience as twins and expands into examining the interconnectedness between AI and users. By investigating how AI learns and adapts through cycles of data, feedback, and simulation, the project reflects on the reciprocal influence between users and technology. Essentially, Digital Twin merges personal narratives with AI to create a shared digital identity, exploring the fluidity of data through interactive storytelling and public engagement.

* Our Agent excerpt (1min08s, 2021)

* Our Agent was created during China’s COVID lockdown, amidst online/offline protests and our dilemmas, including visa sponsorship, familial expectations, career paths, romantic relationships, and closeted identity. In this video project, a digital pig acts as a surrogate intelligent agent, experiencing life events on our behalf. Each event is AI-generated, drawn from its vast datasets. Ultimately, the digital pig becomes a stand-in for all of us, with our lives feeding into AI generative models.

* Carrie Chen

* Eye Exercise 眼保健操（2023)

* Eye Exercise 眼保健操 is an animated portrait series of the artist’s younger avatar-self. This ongoing body of work draws from her childhood memories of the daily exercise required in mainland Chinese schools, a practice unheard of in most countries.

* Yuchi Ma

* Pandas are Pandas (12min, 2025)

* “Pandas Are Pandas” is an experimental video exploring the Giant Panda as both national icon and diasporic metaphor. Using the 2023 recall of pandas to China as a starting point, the filmmaker draws parallels with their own experience as a Parachute Kid—sent abroad and later uprooted. Blending archival footage, personal memory, and pop culture, the work reflects on migration, identity, and the strange afterlives of cultural symbols caught between belonging and displacement.

* Ruoyi Shi

* Unreadable 口 （7min, 2023? 2024?)

* A vision therapy video that helps improving reading comprehension and reading speed. When a computer program cannot recognize foreign characters, it often uses hollow square shapes as the placeholder. These squares, sharing the same shape as the Chinese word (口/Kou)," meaning "mouth" in English. Originating from Pictograms, Chinese characters are simplified depictions of tangible objects. They evolved from literal representations to encompass symbolic and metaphoric meanings. The character “Kou/口" not only signifies actions involving the mouth but also serves as a fundamental element in the structure of other characters. As a vision therapist, I modified texts from the chosen paragraph, keeping only the square shapes. These squares are used to form content that is both readable and unreadable, speakable and unspeakable to all of us.

* Kevin Tian

* Arrival / Departure 到达 / 出发（9min, 2018）

* A girl returns to her childhood home on the outskirts of Earth’s Fig)Capital from the Jupiter Colonies. A message had reached her from across the stars. Someone arrives as someone departs. This may be a video about photochemical imprints of stillness & digital etchings of movement. This may be a film about the forgotten surrealness of a car, a bus & a plane. This may be a fragment of a recording of the transitory as embodied by flight.

* An Nguyen

* We used to take the long way home (13min15s, 2025)

* Returning to Vietnam for the first time since middle school, a teenage girl reunites with old friends for a nostalgic summer road trip to 'Lake Perfect.’ This film is a coming-of-age road movie about the hottest days of summer and friendship that spans across oceans of time.

* Sining Zhu

* Searching for Preopercular Bone (13min22s, 2023)

* Between the fish immigrants and the Asian immigrants, we do not intend to find an absolute juxtaposition, but we hope to use an empathic cherishing as a gesture to dig the fish bones, trying to find the natural possibility of de-anthropocentrism.

* Camille Siyan Ji

* The Flame Still Burns (1min53s, 2023?)

* The Flame Still Burns is an 8mm film shot in the artist’s hometown in China, capturing fleeting moments of landscape and everyday life. Through the grain of film and the frame of windows, the familiar shifts into the uncanny, shaped by undercurrents of absence and time.

* Asuka Lin

* Into the Emerald Sea (20min15s, 2024)

* In this quiet fable, Suzu mysteriously emerges onto the beach of their hometown, and discovers their grandmother reincarnated as a sea turtle. Together, they must undergo their own processes of reconnection and find a new meaning of home.

* Michael Luo

* Juvenoia (10min, 2024)

* A zero player experience. Juvenoia presents shifting snapshots of my nostalgia for a village in Southwestern China that no longer exists, along with distorted dreamscapes caused by a weariness towards the adoptive country of America. It is an allegorical portrait of a diasporic coming of age.Being an immigrant in the West means killing the part of you grown from your home, your history, your language, your past, and your future. In retrospect, this work was an X-Ray of my illness, my unnamed dread, my dear home crushed by Chinese hegemonic modernization and American neoliberal capitalism. Juvenoia lives in the limbo of it all, as do I.

Artist Bios

Kevin Tian is the working alias for MSC_836, one of our designated observers of SolSystem_WorldLine.6479. Her current transmissions are encoded in a primitive form of slow-band visual-aural datastream apparently fitting for her environment.

Siyan Camille Ji is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BFA in Photography from CalArts and an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California. Ji's work begins with photography as a medium to reflect her inner experiences and perceptions through an outward gaze. She delves into the acts of memory and forgetting, exploring the interplay between personal recollections and broader historical narratives. Her practice emphasizes the subtle relationships between images, employing methods such as sequencing, interruption, and repetition to create “visual poetry” that extends the viewer's journey of memory. In her recent works, Ji integrates text, installation, and video to transform two-dimensional images into multidimensional "memoryscape", finding points of contact between human emotions and the disordered memories they induce.

Asuka Lin is a Japanese-Taiwanese writer/director known for their short films ‘Into the Emerald Sea’ (Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival), and ‘A.I. Mama’ (London Short Film Festival). Their directorial work travels from anarchic cyberpunk to meditative folktales, united by themes of displacement and conflicting realities informed by socio-ecological phases. They earned their BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in film/video, and works as a post-production coordinator for BluBird Post in Chicago.

Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Inspired by ancient tales and rituals intertwined with language, habits, and societal norms, she combines humor and fiction to construct her poetic narratives. Her work explores the interface between nature and artificial existences, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication. Ruoyi was born and raised in Nanjing, China. She is a recent MFA graduate from the California Institute of the Arts (2021) and received her BFA degree in sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2019.

Carrie Chen (she/her) is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose interdisciplinary practice spans CG animation, simulation, and installation. Engaging with art history and non-Western ontologies, her work examines hybridity, temporality, and representation through the lens of intercultural memory and narrative. She has exhibited internationally and is currently an adjunct professor at USC’s Media Arts + Practice program.

Michael Luo is a Los Angeles-based media artist, game maker, and educator who explores interactivity, digital/social culture, and experimental media. He holds an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA, where he also completed his BA. Luo’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at SITE Santa Fe, A MAZE. Festival (Berlin), Playtopia Festival (Cape Town), and the Independent Games Festival. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Occidental College, where he teaches courses on game design and media arts.

We are Zhengyang and Zhengzhou Huang, a twin artist duo from Chongqing, China. Our work reimagines our relationship with ever-evolving digital technologies. Using mediums such as animation, games, web, and physical objects, we create stories, interactive applications, speculative designs, and alternative technologies. Essentially, our work joins the never-ending effort to create interfaces and channels that bridge emerging digital phenomena with tangible experiences. We have shown our most recent works at AT HOME, IKEA Residency Closing Show, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Plicnik Space Initiative, and the New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles.

Sining Zhu, (b. China) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, video, performance, sound, and multimedia. Her practice focuses on the complicated relationship and cognition of identity between the self and others, the individual and the group, human and nonhuman, life and death. Her enthusiastic roots in research practice and collective behavior, which she uses to reveal indisputable facts and hidden delicate sorrow in the social environment. By overlaying everyday, personal, and reminiscent objects and accumulating new contexts and meanings to awaken collective resonance. Sining works have been exhibited in New York, Los- Angeles, Tokyo, Beijing, and other places worldwide. Sining holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts (Calarts) in Los Angeles and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. 

Leming Chung is an artist who works with video and installation. 

An Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist from Vietnam whose work explores themes of memory, belonging, and identity. Inspired by her own experience as an immigrant, Nguyen’s films navigate the confusing and lonely waters of becoming and being.

Yuchi Ma is a multidisciplinary artist, director, and creative from Beijing, based in Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Film & Television Production from USC (2019) and an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA (2022). Her work has been exhibited in film and art spaces across the U.S., including the Slamdance 2023 Film Festival, where her experimental short RED THREADS was awarded the Grand Jury Prize.