About film

This photo-video essay is part of an ongoing project “Anita & Ava – Photography as a Self-restorative Tool”, which looks at how two childhood friends explored their gender identity through photography, as they transitioned into adulthood. Fan Chon originally found this series of photographic portraits in an antique shop in Penang. The portraits were of the late Ava Leong taken in the 1950s and 1960s in which she self-restored from an adolescent boy to a woman. After the artist got in touch with Ava's surviving lifelong friend, Anita, the collection expanded and he carried out a series of interviews with Anita to gather background information on these photographs. A compilation of Anita's voices is used as the foundation of this video essay. These audio clips are juxtaposed with a selection of Ava and Anita’s photographic collection that reveals their journey of self-discovery through studio photography and other social activities, Anita’s working experience as a school lab technician and her life on stage as a woman impersonator. These photographs symbolize a time when they, together with their peers from the transgender community, were allowed to explore their sense of self while contributing to a lively cosmopolitan artistic culture in Malaysia.

About filmmaker

Hoo Fan Chon is a Malaysian visual art practitioner based in Penang; he graduated with a BA in Photography at the University of Arts London – London College of Communication in 2010. He co-founded an art collective – Run Amok (2012-2017) in George Town, Penang.

He was one of the recipients of the first cycle of SEA AiR—Studio Residencies for Southeast Asian Artists in the European Union (SEA AiR) organised by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2022. Recently he participated in the Ilham Art Show 2022 (Kuala Lumpur, 2022), “Myth Makers — Spectrosynthesis III” (Hong Kong, 2023) and “The Oceans and The Interpreters” (Taipei, 2023). His solo exhibitions include "The World is Your Restaurant" (Kuala Lumpur, 2021) and “Let Them Eat Salmon” (Singapore, 2023). His research-driven projects examine how value systems fluctuate as people move from one culture to another. Reframing mundane aspects of everyday life with irony and wry humour, his works address notion of cultural authenticity and they set in motion the frictions and the overlaps produced by the migration of cultural symbols between different sociocultural contexts.