From 30 June to 25 July, Sine Screen takes over Room 5 of our current exhibition ‘Unlicensed Goods’, exploring its themes through moving images. A weekly programme of artist films, low-budget 1980s bootleg video films, feminist hauntings from the 1990s and contemporary mediations on archival materials coalesce to produce new narratives around histories of circulation, distribution and marginality that define our cinema histories.

Programme 1: The Spaces in Between 30 June to 4 July

Programme 2: Bad Time (video, video tape, video room) 7 July to 11 July

Programme 3: Corrupt Copies, (Muted) Forms 14 July to 18 July

Programme 4: Feminist Hauntings and Returns 21 July to 25 July

Programme 2

Bad Time (video, video tape, video room)

Drawing from Guangzhou-based practitioner Qin Dao’s 烂片 (bad film) project, this programme revisits a moment when cinema fractured into unofficial circuits of reproduction.

Total viewing time: 180min The looping starts everyday at 12:00 and 15:00

China’s 1980s–90s ‘video films’ sit in the overlap of bootleg markets and low-budget production. Through visual codes from Hong Kong cinema, foreign-sounding titles, and counterfeit packaging, these works mobilised disguise to navigate uneven conditions of production. Yet within these acts of replication emerged a radical visual imagination: hybrid genres, impossible storylines, and excessive fantasies that far exceeded their borrowed forms.

Originally hosted as part of The Cult Buried in Chinese Videotapemovie—Bad Film Made in China from 1966 to 1992 in Guangzhou, this programme brings together selected video films and re-assembled footage, tracing these productions as unstable copies caught between memory, repetition and disappearance.

Untitled Short | Onomatopoeia Office | 13’

Assembled from fragments of various lanpian by Onomatopoeia Office. Sketching the contours of consumer culture in 1980s China, moving between dance halls filled with pop music and video rooms operating as underground cinemas.

A Messenger from Hell 地狱来的请帖 | Lu Dongqing | 1989 | 91’ | China

An inescapable melancholy hangs over A Messenger from Hell — an 1980s story still caught in the shadows of the 1970s. The protagonist is haunted by the singing voice of his dead lover. An elderly woman follows him wherever he goes, insisting that a disaster is drawing near. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is being harrased by her former boyfriend, while her supervisor behaves strangely.

Motordisco 旋风摩托车手 | Jiang Qinmin | 1990 | 76’ | China

Motordisco possesses a kind of futuristic nostalgia: stylish youth and disco, gangsters and motorcycles. A chance encounter with a motorcycle gang's bank robbery sets off a deadly chain of events, throwing Xuanfeng and his lover into a spiral of desire, violence, obsession and pursuit.

Note: A Messenger from Hell was produced during the peak period of VHS lanpian (bad films) production in the late 1980s. While Motordisco belongs to a transitional moment when Chinese lanpian productions became increasingly polished, later circulating through VCD distribution.

Programme 1

The Spaces in Between Four artist moving-image films exploring how histories circulate through and become embedded within public space.

Total viewing time: 60 minutes This programme considers how landscapes—both urban and natural—hold traces of history just beneath the surface: in the imprint of a footprint, the ghostly persistence of memory, the cracks of pavements, rocks and concrete. Traversing sites from contemporary urban development in Hong Kong to the legend of a rock in Buseok said to conceal ‘enough food to feed all of Korea’; from the communal spaces of Seward Park in New York to the Guazhou Reservoir in Guangdong, China, constructed during the Great Leap Forward era, the programme reflects on how place bears witness to histories both visible and buried.

Across four artist films, Simon Liu’s Signal 8 and Daphne Xu’s ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong explore the competing forces of violence, alienation, and the potential for community embedded within urban structures. Xiao Zhang reaches beneath the surface to examine the profound impact of dam construction through a personal dialogue with her grandmother in Words Fly Back to Black Earth, while Park Kyujae moves in a straight line of flight, from a temple to his grandmother’s house, set between a floating rock in Buseok.

Signal 8 | Simon Liu | 2019 | 14’ | Hong Kong

Simon Liu’s eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a series of strange disruptions to the city’s urban infrastructure. Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an impending hazardous event that may never arrive.

ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong | Daphne Xu | 2024 | 9’ | USA

The ping pong table at Seward Park in New York City and the in-between space of a Cold War. An immigration lawyer advises on how to tell the truth.

Buseok | Park Kyujae | 2024 | 18’ | South Korea (UK Premiere)

A man searches for memories of his family’s past, alternating between Geomeunyeo, Buseok Temple, and his grandmother’s house, all of which are located along a straight line on the map. Geomeunyeo is a rock located in the reclaimed area of Buseok, Seosan, South Korea. It was originally a reef that was exposed above sea level, but is now above ground. The name of Buseok, which means floating rock, is said to be derived from Geomeunyeo.

Words Fly Back to Black Earth | Xiao Zhang | 2025 | 19’ | China (UK Premiere)

A calling inhabits the blank pages, unfolding a secret writing of hers. The unseen written traces seep from the murmuring land, pushing through fragmented voices to become new forms, beings made material. Framed as a dialogue with my grandmother, this film explores an alternative form of personal writing by Chinese women in political shifts, absent and abundant. The ‘blank’ becomes an image, carrying a search for agency; of land transformed and of women unheard. By breaking down linguistic structures, the film opens a space for imagining, reading, and performing, allowing for emergence.