Short film, 32 mins.
Originally shown at Fondazione Prada October 26, 2023 - February 26, 2024, as part of the group show "PARAVENTI."
Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, The Sojourn (2023) imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic landscapes where Dragon Inn was shot. He advises on the perfect conditions of mist and weather. Yet, in the journey through the mountains of Hehuanshan, the sublime landscape of King Hu remains ever elusive. She later visits the elementary school of Indigenous filmmaker and principal Pilin Yapu of the Atayal tribe. Absent of conventional subtitles, the essay film employs text burned into the center of the frame as a mode of translation, sometimes refusing total disclosure.
Commissioned by Fondazione Prada for the exhibition PARAVENTI, the work is reconstructed in installation form as a video sculpture against a readymade folding screenand plays upon the double meaning of screen culture. The video sculpture proposes a way to think about the history of folding screens a proto form of cinema. Probing the ways institutions show landscape art that serve to often codify a national imaginary of space and territory, specifically in the case of contemporary exhibition of premodern Chinese aesthetics, The Sojourn distorts and defamiliarizes the landscape form as both moving image and object.
MoMa Documentary Fortnight – New York, NY
Open City Documentary Film Festival – London, UK
PARAVENTI, Fondazione Prada – Milan, Italy
Basel, Statements – Basel, Switzerland
Art Basel Statements, 2024.
Fondazione Prada, 2023.