A double bill pairs famed street photographer Ho Fan and Suh Po-ling’s experimental feature Lost (1970) with Tiffany Sia’s What Rules the Invisible (2022), a short film that reworks mid-20th-century Hong Kong travelogue footage. The sole surviving 35mm print of Lost was rediscovered in 2021 by the Reel to Reel Institute at the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Following a Hong Kong ink artist torn between Chinese and Western influences, between spiritual yearning and carnal desire, between abandon and control, Lost captures the sense of disorientation – and the spirit of experimentation – that accompanied Hong Kong’s transformations at the end of the 1960s. Premiering at Cannes in 1970, the film was later screened at the First Festival of Women’s Films in New York in 1972 on the recommendation of Hong Kong filmmaker Tang Shu Shuen.

Hong Kong-American artist Tiffany Sia’s What Rules the Invisible reworks mid-century travelogue footage through her sojourner’s gaze, which positions us, the spectator, at a distant, distorted, and at times voyeuristic position to interrogate how the city has been continually mythologised by opposing forces. The essay film is also inscribed with Sia’s mother’s recollections of colonial Hong Kong—oral histories for which no images exist.