WANG Bo
Korean Premiere
This film is about haunting memories of Asia¡¯s late 20th century modernization. The story departs from a 1965 United States embargo on the hair trade, known as the 'Communist Hair Ban'. In every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.
Wang Bo's new work is full of historical sensitivity and cinematic imagination. The short begins in 1965, when the U.S. Treasury Department imposed an embargo on "Asian hair," or wigs. Later, the embargo was limited to "communist hair," and South Korea emerged as the center of the wig industry, with Hong Kong becoming the center of the trade. The director retells this history through the story of a woman's wig. Like the meaningful last words of the wig, which traveled between Asia and the United States along the tides of colonization and the Cold War, goods are always transformed and hide the past, but the past does not disappear but reappears. What more insightful allegory could there be for Hong Kong, a vestige of colonization, a frontline of the Cold War, and a center of transnational exchange?
WANG Bo
Wang Bo is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including venues like Guggenheim Museum and MoMA (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), Rotterdam International Film Festival, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Visions du Réel (Nyon, Switzerland), LUX & Open City Documentary Festival (London), DMZ Docs (South Korea), and Para Site (Hong Kong), among many others.