“It is a paradox: repression produces excess”: Su Hui-Yu on Re-shooting History

There are audiovisual artists for whom cinema is a medium of historical reanimation. In the works of Taiwanese filmmaker and artist Su Hui-Yu, the camera does precisely that: it documents bodies that resurrect forbidden desires and ideological ghosts. His films and installations inhabit the uneasy space where censorship meets aesthetic form, and where martial law animates the imagination before sedimenting it into public discourse. And it is here, within the regulation of history and the gaps of popular culture, that Su gathers his thoughts and materials like an archaeologist. He makes films neither from what history remembers nor from what it conceals, but, in his words, “from what it failed to finish.” He calls this practice “reshooting.”

At the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS) 2025, Su’s retrospective brought together four short films that oscillate between eroticism, the colonial archive, and state violence in Taiwan – The Walker (2017), The Glamorous Boys of Tang (2018), Future Shock (2019), and The Women’s Revenge (2020) – alongside his feature-length film The Trio Hall, which premiered at the 2025 Berlinale. Conceived as a “museum production company,” this latter work dissolves the frontier between exhibition and production, somehow turning filmmaking into a live performance in which audiences witness – and participate in – the film’s becoming. Su’s actors, for example, improvise histories of Taiwanese modernity, soap operas, and imported American variety shows, while their bodies negotiate the absurd choreography of popular culture and local histories under censorship. What emerges, as Su discusses below, is “the performance of history itself”: unfinished memories that he treats as the raw material of a diaristic inquiry, asking viewers to consider what happens when we reshoot the past – that is, when we treat the archive not as a static record, but as “a moving body still capable of desire”.

In the interview that follows, and ahead of the screening of his short films at the Bulleke-bek Brunswick Cinema (BBBC) in Melbourne, May-June this year, Su speaks of collective memory and queer pleasure, AI scripts and martial-law melodramas. And beneath it all is his conviction that cinema can reopen what was once forbidden, giving it a new afterlife.

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Su Hui-Yu. Q&A with Cristóbal Escobar at FIDOCS 2025

Cristóbal Escobar: Your images are magnetic, sometimes hypnotic, yet they pulse with the memory of colonial violence and censorship. Before we speak of bodies under martial law, could you tell us how you arrived at cinema through video art?

Su Hui Yu: I began in an art department, where video was simply one medium among others. Museums came before cinemas. My first works circulated in Taiwanese institutions, and in 2016 a Rotterdam programmer encountered one of them at the Museum of Modern Art in Taipei. Suddenly, I was asked to submit a film – a word that landed on me like foreign language. That invitation forced me to re-examine my work through the eyes of cinema history rather than exclusively art history. Video art, especially from the 1960s (think of pioneers like Nam June Paik) grew out of museums, installations, bodies in space… Experimental cinema was something else entirely: it imagined an audience held captive in a seat. Today, digital environments blur these fields, but my work was formed at a moment when those distinctions still mattered. That’s why I like to say I’m not moving “from video to cinema,” but learning to look at my own practice from two perspectives at once.

Many of your works reshoot and “complete” existing films. How does this process work for you?

I don’t reshoot to imitate, but to reopen history. Take The Glamorous Boys of Tang.¹ I remember only the poster from childhood, hanging in a tea shop. I had never seen the film, but its absence haunted me. In 2015, I finally watched it on VHS, reading the original script at the National Film Archive. Entire sequences had vanished – some lost through censorship, others abandoned by budget or ideology. So instead of remaking the film, I decided to film what was missing.

Those gaps are political. 1985 Taiwan was still under martial law. Desire, violence, and pleasure circulated under surveillance. So, I’d say that to reshoot those scenes today is not an act of nostalgia, but a confrontation with what official history forced cinema to forget. Sometimes I don’t use film at all. In the museum version, I presented the work on a folding screen made from Chinese form. Viewers moved around it; cinema became spatial, tactile, reversible. The missing film scenes returned as an object you could walk around, almost like a wound turned inside out. 

Su Hui-Yu’s masterclass at FIDOCS School 2025

And what happens to the body when you revisit these censored eras?

Under martial law, desire had a strict choreography. Bodies could not express freely, yet cinema was obsessed with them (e.g., erotic thrillers, exploitation films, revenge fantasies, and so on). They were censored, but at the same time – or perhaps for this reason – they flourished. It is a paradox: repression produces excess. Take The Women’s Revenge for example. This is a Taiwanese exploitation film influenced by Italian and Japanese cinema. Or The Glamorous Boy of the Town, written by Hong Kong–Taiwanese screenwriter Chou Kang-jie. It was filmed in Taiwan but finished in Hong Kong, where whole pieces of the script disappeared. These films are cult not because they were successful, but because they survived erasure. They are fossil records. And with theatre is a similar story. After martial law ended, the 1990s saw experimental groups like Yuba: low budget, queer, radically local, fiercely physical. Their performances shaped my sense of gesture, of bodies reclaiming something stolen from them. I don’t copy their work, it’s more about reactivating its unfinished desires, and the marks they left in my body. 

You often speak of “temporal confusion.” Could you expand on that?

Taiwan’s history is plural; you have Japanese rule, U.S. Cold War influence, internal dictatorship, etc. We have lived within multiple times at once. When I revisit an old text, like Future Shock (1972), which I found in my grandfather’s library, I’m not adapting it. I’m collapsing it into the present. Filming in 1970s industrial sites in Kaohsiung today makes time tilt. So, in a way, we don’t film the past so much as the present-as-phantom – it’s like treating history as a form of contemporary archaeology.

Audience participation is a key feature in your work (I’m thinking, for example, of Women’s Revenge and White Waters) Why invite the public to film or reshape what they watch?

Because traditional spectatorship is also a form of censorship. What we look at determines what survives. In Revenge Scenes, for example, audience members could film the performance with a mobile app, streaming it onto screens in real time. That creates layers: archive, performance, piracy, participation, etc. They become both witnesses and accomplices. Same goes to The White Waters, which is based on a queer theatre group formed by Tian Chi-Yuan – a director who died of AIDS – and where we built movable three-channel walls. Here, the dancer interacts with them as if wrestling both memory and projection. The audience moves too. We watch the body struggle inside narrative infrastructures, not just within narrative meaning.

Su Hui-Yu’s masterclass at FIDOCS School 2025, with translator Juan Pablo Miranda

And The Trio Hall seems to go even further in this direction, making production and exhibition almost indistinct. 

Yes, that project began at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei in 2023. We created a sort of “museum production company,” where the film wasn’t only screened – it was made in front of the audience. They walked through editing rooms, rehearsal spaces, dressing tables, overheard script arguments, and soap operas being re-used. The film was constantly rewritten in public view, as if history itself were being revised on the spot. It became clear to me that making a narrative is not so different from making a memory: both are constructed through choices, omissions, misunderstandings, improvisations, and so on. Inside this process, three different temporalities kept colliding. One came from the 1980s, when Taipei opened its first modern art museum and Western perspectives suddenly reorganised local artistic thinking. Another was rooted in the “three-room romance” melodramas of the same period – films that unfolded in tiny spaces like bedrooms, living rooms, cafes or discos, domestic architectures where modernity squeezed desire into tight corners. And then there was the language of American variety shows, imported into Taiwanese television like a weekly masquerade party: the slapstick rhythm, the exaggerated satire, a kind of pop-cultural gymnastics that shaped our collective memory. So The Trio Hall became an environment where these forms rubbed against each other – modern art, melodrama, and televised spectacle. When we later restaged the project in Bogotá [for what it will become The Trio Hall 2] the resonance was immediate: Cold War influence, imported pop culture, modern art institutions coexisting with local telenovelas. The soup opera energy folded in perfectly, I definitely felt at home! Denmark, where the third part of this project will be shot, will be more challenging, but difficulty is part of the method I guess… Each site forces us to confront how cultural memory travels, mutates, and insists on being performed again.

Your projects now incorporate AI. How do you navigate this new tool?

AI is already historical. In the 1980s, people talked about it as the future. This is the third wave. We used AI to generate parts of the script for The Trio Hall. The result was terrible – flat, nonsensical – but when the actors performed it, something uncanny emerged. AI can propose text, but only bodies can risk interpretation. It must remain a partner, not an author. A slippery collaborator who reminds us why human performance matters.

In that direction, you continually return to forgotten narratives…

Yes, and this is because our present is already a reconstruction of the past. Taiwan’s colonial and martial law histories teach us that memory is not neutral. Reshooting, revisiting, performing – these are not just aesthetic gestures, but a political montage that exposes the fissures and the gaps within history. Cinema, for me, reopens what was once forbidden – not to restore it, but to complicate it and make it vibrate differently in the present. I want audiences to step into these unfinished memories and feel them stirring now, because history is what we choose to reshoot or recount today. 

Su Hui-Yu’s masterclass at FIDOCS School 2025

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