Curator Pick: My Sight is Lined with Visions

With a return to cinemas still remaining a far-off dream, streaming remains the monolithic way that films and videos are being watched. It’s hard to stand out when there’s such a glut of what the industry calls “content” to wade through.

Which makes the streaming program called My Sight Is Lined With Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video feel especially welcome and valuable. Pushing beyond any traditional histories of film and video, this series (presented by Sentient.Art.Film and curated by Abby Sun and Keisha Knight) foregrounds radical and adventurous works that upend cultural and cinematic expectations and conventions.

If you look at the works in the program, you’ll find lots of progressive, transgressive, and punk sensibilities that capture a moment that feels both historical and exceedingly contemporary. In how these works were produced and circulated, they also tell a bit of the history of the Wexner Center’s first decade.

A number of new media centers were blossoming across the country and, in an age before home editing and postproduction software, video production was becoming more accessible than ever. The Wex’s Film/Video Studio (then called Art & Technology) was born then and My Sight Is Lined With Visions filmmakers Roddy Bogawa and Rea Tajiri were among those early residencies.

Vital and form-busting works by Shu Lea Cheang and Jon Moritsugu were shown on Wexner Center screens (including several of the films in the My Sight series), often with the filmmaker present. It was a special pleasure to welcome Roddy Bogawa back to the Wex in 2015 when he returned to present his latest film, Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis.

Chances to see these singular films are more rare than they should be so the My Sight Is Lined With Vision series (which runs through January 25, 2022) provides an exceptional opportunity to discover forgotten histories and alternate futures.