AFTER THE LAST LIGHT
Moving between personal memory, sensory perception, and technological environments, this screening hosted by To Dive explores images that emerge at the limits of visibility, featuring art film shorts that question the relationship between vision, light, and the existence of the image. Some turn toward blindness and the ways images can be constructed through touch, sound, and imagination. Others examine landscapes transformed by artificial illumination, where light no longer reveals the world but overwhelms it.
In Another Night
by Zhu Yunyi
2024, 5 minutes, w/ English subtitles
In the early 1980s, rapid urban development brought bright lights everywhere, and fireflies disappeared at lightning speed. Within a few years, there were no more fireflies in the city. Today, an elderly man shares with us his memory of fireflies on a certain night
Chroma
by Zhu Yunyi
2024, 8 minutes, w/ English subtitles
On the afternoon of September 22, 2023, under gentle sunlight at the Summer Palace, aboard a boat drifting on the shimmering iridescent Kunming Lake, Tilda Swinton spoke to us about Derek Jarman’s garden by the sea, his final film Blue, and the poem Chroma that he wrote during the same period. At that time, Jarman had already gone blind and had become extraordinarily sensitive to light and color.
Everything Near Becomes Distant
by Zhu Yunyi
2022, 22 minutes, w/ English subtitles
Xiao Xin developed an eye disease that caused his vision to deteriorate gradually, and in 2015 he became completely blind. Afraid of being enveloped by darkness, he attempts to re-encounter the world through touch in a real yet lonely existence, where unconscious imagination and poetic sensation intermingle. Through an abundance of old photographs, objects, and family footage, images slowly collapse within memory—until all that is near inevitably drifts away.
Look On The Bright Side
by Yuyan Wang
2023, 16 minutes, w/ English subtitles
In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years
The Moon Also Rises
by Yuyan Wang
2023, 25 minutes, w/ English subtitles
The work is based on a 2018 proposal in China to launch three artificial satellites into orbit above major cities in order to provide continuous daylight. Set within a dim and oppressive lighting environment, the imagery depicts drowsy crowds in megacities surrounded by glowing neon lights, alongside workers in LED factories who perform repetitive tasks on assembly lines in a trance-like state.
Of Dreams In The Dream Of Another Mirror
by Zhu Yunyi
2023, 17 minutes, w/ English subtitles
“You are using vision to tell a non-visual story. I don’t think you will succeed, because our story exists outside your telling,” they said. You first ‘see’, and only then do you ‘know’. The world is alive, yet without mirrors, without images, the world might not exist at all.
Blind people, however, produce images in an entirely different way—through sound, texture, and experience. They live on the other side of the mirror. If you are to fall down the rabbit hole to find them, imagination becomes your only clue.
The World Remains Our First And Last Love
by Zhu Yunyi
2025, 9 minutes, w/ English subtitles
Returning to Jingxing, Hebei—the filming location of An Elephant Sitting Still—the film gazes upon forgotten spaces and, guided by Hu Bo’s poetry, unfolds a silent retrospective between reality and memory.
About the film-makers
Zhu Yunyi graduated from the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, and Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts in France. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. Grounded in personal memory and bodily perception, his practice primarily takes the form of moving image and installation. His works have been exhibited at numerous institutions in China and abroad, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, London), the Power Station of Art (PSA, Shanghai), and Mo.Co. Panacée (Montpellier). His short films have been selected for major international film festivals and platforms such as the Berlin International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, and more, where they have received multiple awards.
Wang Yuyan, born in China and currently based in Paris, is a filmmaker and moving-image artist. Her work draws on recycled materials from the industrial system of image production, tracing their mutations and proliferations within digital frameworks and processes of representation. Through editing, Wang deconstructs and recontextualizes the complex hierarchies and internal meanings embedded in these materials. Whether found footage, processed materials, or newly created images, she strips away conventional pathways of symbolic perception, transforming them into immersive sensory experiences.
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