Sino-Malaysian Au Sow Yee (b. 1978, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is based in Taipei and Kuala Lumpur, and works in video installation and other mediums. The three phases of The Kris Project were, collectively, a finalist for the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize 2018. The primary point of departure for the historical investigations that Au initiates is the so-called golden era of the Sinophonic film industry, which reached an efflorescence in the 1950s and ‘60s across Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Based extensively on archival and field research, the work re-imagines history by collapsing the divide between fact and fiction, between the moving image and filmic collage; it utilizes found footage from a range of existing films, from Cathay-Keris movies to documentaries of wartime Malaya, with significance and dialogue emerging anew from the juxtapositions thereof. The first phase, The Kris Project I, creates the persona of a fictional filmmaker named Ravi, through whose lens a pseudo-film of found documents and images is put together. The Kris Project II: If the Party Goes On begins with questions arising from the untimely death of Loke Wan Tho, founder of the Cathay movie empire, portraying an alternate history in which Loke survived the plane crash in 1964. The third phase of The Kris Project draws on the Cathay studio’s first overseas film, A Night in Tokyo. These fragmented, paratactic narratives, caught in the uncomfortable oscillation between mimetic representation and historical speculation, suggests possibilities for resurrecting the spectres of Southeast Asia’s history within broader interpretive frameworks.
