Irish Arts Council Experimental Video Award 1999
Single channel. 6:00.

Gwai-lo combines footage shot in Hong Kong and Guang-dong province with Irish and Chinese ghost mythologies to reflect on the effects of consumerism on our perceptions of mortality, permanence, and memory.

The camera tracks through the underground train system and brightly lit neon shopping malls of the city, where the color saturation and image contrast are manipulated to give the images a ghost-like translucence. A beautiful stop-motion collage of moments captured and lost creates a moving tableau of accidental identity, one where each character is transferred for one moment out of the frenzied chaos of the streets, and archived for a few slow frames.

In the soundtrack, an unidentified Cantonese voice calls out a list of numbers, prices or identification codes, while white outlines of ghostly hands calculate currency conversions in close up exchanges and watches are compared for quality and price. A small sample from an unsettling film soundtrack is reversed and time stretched to create a haunting compositional backdrop, on top of which the camera records strangers in brief moments of stillness. The camera finds reflections in the towering silver and gold mirrored tower blocks of Hong Kong's Central district, observing the people moving through this city of new industry where financial workers are reflected in the glittering surfaces of their workplaces. The piece ends as it begins with arrival by train into a beautiful and dreamlike city of ghosts.