Bo Wang
An Asian Ghost Story

2023
Single-channel colour video, 4:3, stereo sound
English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Malay with English and Chinese subtitles
37 min. 17 s.
Direction, script and editing by Bo Wang
Cinematography by Yavuz Selim Isler and Fai Wan
Produced by Ruoyao Jane Yao and Jia Zhao
Exhibition version commissioned by the Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile (CHAT), Hong Kong
Film version supported by the Netherlands Film Fund

 

When a city transforms, it reappears with the ghosts of its past.

Wigs played a vital role in Asia’s economic rise during the Cold War. In the 1960s, wigs ranked as Hong Kong’s fourth-largest export, with the city acting as a gateway between Communist China, the largest source of hair supplies, and the Western market. In 1965, the United States Treasury imposed an embargo on “Asiatic hair”, rephrased as “communist hair”, to cut off foreign currency flows to Communist China, allowing the wig industry to flourish in US allies such as South Korea and Japan.

Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story departs from the 1965 “Communist Hair Ban”. Narrated by a ghost, An Asian Ghost Story is a historical fiction about haunting memories of Asia’s late-20th-century modernisation and how the wig carries with it a ghost of empire. Hong Kong emerges as a transient city—a portal between East and West, communism and capitalism—like eternal ghosts and imperishable hair, resisting separation between life and death.

An Asian Ghost Story is presented as part of the year-long film programme How to Reappear, curated by Indranjan Banerjee.

How to Reappear presents a series of films that explore what it means to be remade, to survive and to persist in altered forms. The works draw viewers into intimate encounters with transition and transformation, revealing the intensity and tenderness of these processes as well as their moments of shock and disorientation. In these stories, flesh, terrains and topographies become sites where transformation unfolds. They underscore the fragility of bodies and landscapes as myth, illusion and virtuality shape how change is imagined and endured.

 

Bo Wang is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, Garage Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, LUX, Seoul Mediacity Biennale and Sharjah Film Platform, among others. He is a recipient of major international awards, including New:Vision at CPH:DOX, Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig, O.F.F. Prize at Sesc_Videobrasil, Best Doc Short at Sharjah Film Platform, etc. He currently teaches at LUCAS, Leiden University, and is a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam.

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