Hangnail
TITLE
Hangnail
DIRECTOR
Hou Lam Tsui
COUNTRY
Hong Kong
YEAR
2024
DURATION
7′
GENRE
Experimental
Overview

Hangnail
Spanning film photographs, scanned images of pages and book covers, 3D animation, and 2D animation, Hangnail critically explores the fetishisation and romanticisation of feminine death, delving deep into the complex legacy of fictional heroines across various art forms and within the digital realm.

DIRECTOR BIOGRAPHY - Hou Lam Tsui
Hou Lam Tsui (b. 1997) is an artist who works across moving image, sculpture, installation, and text. Her practice centres around personal experience, affect, gender politics, and peripheral storytelling. Tsui rethinks how femininity and queerness are imagined within cultures, critically exploring how media and consumer desires shape emotions, our notion of love, femininity, and identities by drawing inspiration from pop culture, advertisement, anime, literature and beyond. Her work has been previously exhibited and screened at ACMI (Australia), Art Basel Films (Hong Kong), Beijing International Short Film Festival (China), Guangdong Times Museum (China), Para Site (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), Videoex Festival (Switzerland), among others. Selected recent exhibitions include Follow the Feeling (Guangdong Times Museum, 2024), One is not born a woman (Square Street Gallery, 2023), Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery (Para Site; Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, 2022). She is a recipient of the WMA Graduate Award (2024), the Liu Shiming Art Foundation Scholarship (2024), and Para Site’s 2046 Fermentation + Fellowships (2022). Tsui lives and works in Hong Kong. She received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2018 and later obtained an MFA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024.
Credits
- DirectorHou Lam Tsui
- Screenplay Hou Lam Tsui
- Cinematography
- Cast
- Editing
- Producer/s Hou Lam Tsui
- Production Company
- Distributor/s
- Project TitleHangnail
- Project TypeExperimental
- Completion Date1 January 2024
- Country of originHong Kong
- Country of filmingHong Kong
- Language English
- First-time Filmmaker No
- Student ProjectYes

Hou Lam Tsui
Hou Lam Tsui (b. 1997) is an artist who works across moving image, sculpture, installation, and text. Her practice centres around personal experience, affect, gender politics, and peripheral storytelling. Tsui rethinks how femininity and queerness are imagined within cultures, critically exploring how media and consumer desires shape emotions, our notion of love, femininity, and identities by drawing inspiration from pop culture, advertisement, anime, literature and beyond. Her work has been previously exhibited and screened at ACMI (Australia), Art Basel Films (Hong Kong), Beijing International Short Film Festival (China), Guangdong Times Museum (China), Para Site (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), Videoex Festival (Switzerland), among others. Selected recent exhibitions include Follow the Feeling (Guangdong Times Museum, 2024), One is not born a woman (Square Street Gallery, 2023), Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery (Para Site; Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, 2022). She is a recipient of the WMA Graduate Award (2024), the Liu Shiming Art Foundation Scholarship (2024), and Para Site’s 2046 Fermentation + Fellowships (2022). Tsui lives and works in Hong Kong. She received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from the University of Leeds in 2018 and later obtained an MFA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024.