Winner:

Yasmine
Her Love is a Bleeding Tank. (5:30)
Her Love is a Bleeding Tank is a one-take visual poem. The narrator Yasmine is nobody but my selfprojection, and a concentration of delicateness, purity, as well as all virtues which are not celebrated in this fast-paced world. An eye is a theatre, in which I slowly replay the life experience of the little
Yasmine who could never fulfil her dream of being an idol, her endurance of unnecessary hardship, and the relationship between stoicism and love.

Honourable mentions:
Zeppra
Song of Body, Side A (3:00)
I am trying to activate an ancient use of language, in which case what is uttered is eagerly looking for being realised (like a spell or the Word which becomes flesh). Here, the collocations of the word“body” listed out in a brainstorming game long for an object just like a knife longing for human skin.
Then some images embodied in papers are sacrificed to fulfil their will. Those images are inanimate objects wearing human beings’ looks. They conspired with a pair of hands out of the composition to perform a disposable dance with their virtual body. So, in this piece, I bleach the printed bodies to
retrieve their thingness and keep the dancing objects close to the absurdity of language to retrieve their wordiness.

Wo Chan
Years Flow By Like Water (5:49)
Years Flow By Like Water by Anita Mui is a digital drag act I created in 2020. I filmed this at the end of summer as the city started bracing itself for the second shutdown. The song is about time’s passage— it is melancholic, sung bittersweetly by Anita Mui in Cantonese. I was born in Macau, so Cantonese is
my first language, a language I began losing when I came to the States. Whenever I hear it, something aches inside me. It is fundamental, large, and hollow, like a bell answering the hum of another. The song is paired with excerpts of incantatory text, which I pose as lower thirds. I don’t completely
understand the Cantonese lyrics when it’s sung, but my impulse isn’t to try to translate them. They’re not trying to be explained. Who is the audience who gets to understand everything, anyways? Maybe words can do drag too.

Phonix Yuan
Intertwined (3:15)
Covid-19 dictates a state of isolation: mask-wearing and self-isolation leave people with only a pair of eyes exposed to the Others. Indeed, eyes are ‘the window of the mind’. As such as they are, when I gaze into my eyes and when I gaze into others’, I feel merely estrangement. As interpersonal
interactions transform into online streaming, the others I see are just digits turned light beams encountering my optic nerves. Then I see you, but it’s not you, but your cyborg. What connects us is the Internet, the optic neural network… There seems to be some sort of association between the web
and the eye. I invited my friends to record their eyes gazing at the camera, wrote a short poem and made this experimental film ‘Intertwined’.

Runners up:

Shaw and Ziqi
Xiwu Temple (1:24)
On the night of the tenth day of the first lunar month, the moon was glimmering. When I climbed up Mount Wu, I saw a Taoist temple in the stone forest – Xiwu Temple. There was no idol in the temple, which made the inside a void. A little moonlight was sprinkled, and a few Taoist magic figures could
be seen. With a closer look, the scenery of the West Lake emerged from them. On the twelfth day of the month, I attempted to search for the temple but failed. The temple seemed to disappear. I was astounded that the disappearance of the temple corresponded to the name, Wu (Void). After several times of visiting West Lake and Mount Wu, I still could not find a trace of the temple. Nevertheless, as I appreciated the magnificent views of the lake and the mountain, I realised that I should not be looking for the temple. Hence, I went into the lake.

Zhang Yue
It is Cold. I’m Looking For a Bird (5:00)
In the last days of 2021, I was in Beijing. It was icy cold. Outside my room in James Joyce Coffetel, there was a railway, and the trains were passing by from dawn till night. I found it quite fascinating and saw some birds move around which were not scared. I always have nostalgia for Southern China whenever
I am in the North, and I dug into those invincible memories in hot days in Hangzhou, where the West Wetland is, and in Hainan Island, the southernmost of China. It’s said that Master Zhuang dreamed of a butterfly and never figured out whether he dreamed of the butterfly, or the butterfly dreamed of
him. At last, I found myself to be the bird I’m looking for. The piano music played by my friend Guili Yu, is a piece of ancient Persian work “the Voice of Phoenix” and I edited it.

He Haonan
Bionic (3:40)
The interactive audio-visual installation uses poem videos as content, and karaoke music tapes are aesthetic forms to restore the KTV environment in the exhibition space, and visitors are invited to sing (recite) the poems along with the video poems through microphones. In the second part, I guided
participants to create new words and sentences to interact with images, sounds and previous poetry texts by changing the font of the subtitles. In my opinion, karaoke seems to provide a contemporary text-sound-image interactive practical model. I am interested in KTV as a kind of trust space, which enhances people’s sensibility and the ability and desire to share deep emotions. But this work is not just a simple appropriation of “KTV experience”, because, in essence, KTV is a  modern typified way of expressing emotions relying on business. I want to extend this experience further and more lasting. This work was selected by the “AMALGAMATA” exhibition at the Chengdu Biennale in China.

Guo Yixing
Subtropical Drifting (5:00)
Gu Yue lives in a temporary home in the forest. After saying goodbye to his friend Dind, he wanders around alone. On one side of the forest is the sea, and when Gu Yue saw the sea, Gu Yue felt very at ease. At night, Gu Yue fell asleep in the cold wind. Later, the temporary home was destroyed, and Gu Yue had to continue on the road.

Lee Campbell
Clever At Seeing Without Being Seen (10:15)
Innovating the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of the voices, this multi-layered multimedia live ZOOM poetry performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic, and a disorienting montage of young queer experience told through my own
personal autobiography. There are so many different references to decades of British history through different registers of image-making, language, and bodies through a complex repetitive system of layering making the viewer continually question how many layers there are.