Belonging and Difference (2023) is a short film and a long-distance collaborative endeavor between Cici Wu and Yuan Yuan. Together, they used 16mm film and digital video, with text written in Traditional Chinese and English, and a short voice-over narration in Cantonese. The work began with footage from East Broadway Mall in New York’s Chinatown during the pandemic, where workers describe both their expectations regarding working conditions and the actual circumstances in a neighborhood that is gradually becoming more vacant and transforming daily. It then moves to footage from Beijing, captured around the time of the White Paper Protest – both before and after – including scenes of quarantine, family life, memorial sites of June 4th, and an underground queer party, ending with footage from Hong Kong: the cross-harbor tunnel, which references the siege of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, a wound that still remains open.

At the heart of this work, the artists explore how the notions of “diasporic” and “migratory” are indexed, suggesting the potential of migratory aesthetics rather than territorial defense as an experimental means of repair – continuously narrating, expressing, liberating, and awakening. They search along manifold routes and pathways for ways to negotiate identity not through geography or nationality, but rather through flexible networks of social belonging and political alignment.

The memories of the isolation caused by transit and travel between Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York in 2022 and 2023 linger. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind. The world of life and the world of film occupy the same temporal flow, and as spectators – caught between horizons, blurred images, and unexpected breaks – we move between belonging and difference.

“Belonging and difference” is, in fact, the dimension that fundamentally shapes Cici and Yuan’s video work. But while the idea of belonging might suggest a sense of group or community unity, here it is much more closely linked to difference – as a productive force and a constant movement of transformation. Identity escapes this equation. An alternative notion of identity is put to the test: porous and circulating, discontinuous and errant.