as a bird that briefly perches (2024/2025)
In her line of work, Dorothy often discusses the notions of identity and memories, home and communities. Departing from her personal experience as a diasporic artist, this three-part video work is a cinematic diary that weaves together her sentiments about homeland with reference to the geology of Hong Kong; an analogy between human nature and greenhouse gardening; and her reflections on the choice of living abroad as she studies the everyday life of migrant farmers and their adaptation on foreign soil, reinterpreting agricultural processes and the migration of species. The work explores the implications of rooting, re-rooting and growing as the artist contemplates on the evolving dynamics between land and human.
(Curatorial text written by Catherine Lau for the exhibition Nature: A Perception)
Heart Murmurs (2023)
Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.
The film is commissioned by Visual AIDS and supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
Reverberation (2023)
Reverberation is an experimental film that centres on Yau Ma Tei—a district in Hong Kong that was home to various independent art and cultural spaces in the 2010s and was also where the filmmaker began her practice. By overlapping new and archival images, the film delves into layers of memories to capture complex emotions about this district as well as the city as a whole.
The film is commissioned by M+ museum as part of their Hong Kong as Mise-en-scène initiative.
If I Can’t Dance (2022)
She faces endless rehabilitation; her body keeps recalling the injury; she wishes to appease, yet she fell... Three dancers who have confronted injuries filled the visual with strain on the body. Collaborated with dancer and choreographer Jennifer Mok, the film ponders how to co-exist with the trauma and keep going after one’s world falls apart.
If I Can’t Dance is co-commissioned by City Contemporary Dance Company, Jumping Frames – Hong Kong International Movement-image Festival and Renaissance Foundation Hong Kong.
Memory Palace (2021)
Memory Palace is a moving image work exploring memories attached to the personal objects of ethnic Chinese people in Manchester. These objects tell extremely personal stories that reflect the complexity of living between two worlds and navigating multiple identities, not only as an ethnic Chinese person living in the UK, but also as an LGBTQ individual, senior citizen, adoptee, artist, Eurasian, or first-generation immigrant. The work challenges conventional understandings of the Chinese community, questioning what it means to be an ethnic Chinese individual in this city and highlighting the great spectrum of identities beyond nationality.
Memory Palace was filmed in 2020 with the support of British Council Hong Kong, Phillips Auctioneers and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art.
Home, and a Distant Archive (2020)
Home, and a Distant Archive is a poetic portrait of four Hong Kong women aboard in London, who volunteered for retrieving and digitising the UK records of the handover agreement between the United Kingdom and China, and their thoughts on identity, diaspora and their home at this troubled time. The film is a resonant, poetic, deeply personal, yet expansive reflection, bringing into sharp relief the political and existential moment we are in.
A Room of Oblivion (2019)
A Room of Oblivion is an experimental film reflecting on the notion of queer memories, and the failure of it through rediscovered footage taken in a journey with an ex-partner.
Letter to the Outsider (2018)
The short film is based on a letter transgresses the boundary of inside and outside, here and there. Witnessing Hong Kong’s situation far from home, the film attempts to question human perception of a space or a country, reflected in images of repurposed prisons in the Netherlands.
dreaming in another language (2024)
dreaming in another language is a short film that delves into the filmmaker’s experience as a translator. Drawing from archival footage of Chinese people living in the UK in the 1980s and the introduction of colour separation overlay techniques, the film navigates themes of displacement, disappearance, and the intricate politics of languages.