Lloyd Wong, Unfinished, Lesley Loksi Chan
An experimental video made of low-fi footage shot in the early 1990s depicting a Chinese person living with AIDS. Includes a demo of preparation of foscarnet treatment, shaky super 8 footage from the hospital, and research notes in the form of onscreen text on green screen. Includes images of medical procedures and needles.
Title: Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
Artist: Lesley Loksi Chan
Date: 2025
Medium/Materials: Single channel video
Dimensions: 00:29:00
Form/Genre: Video art
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: HIV/AIDS; Queer inheritance; Intergenerational; Intergenerational knowledge
Artist Statement:
As an artist/filmmaker, Lesley Loksi Chan is concerned with questions of invisibility, believability and resistibility. Through experimental, handmade and process-based filmmaking, she creates moving-images as mementos.
Chan approaches filmmaking as a form of research and as a mode of attention, an attempt to make visible the processes, histories, and emotions that shape how we understand ourselves and each other. Across her projects, she returns to certain concerns: the instability of archives, the politics of representation, and the ways aesthetic forms can gesture toward what is not fully knowable. Chan works slowly and relationally. She builds films out of research, conversation, and the fragments that remain after more official narratives have been consolidated.
Chan spent long periods of time listening, interviewing, re-situating herself within the contexts from which these questions emerge. Her materials include recordings/objects/texts, but they also include the knowledge held within communities, across friendships, and in the memories of those who lived through the histories. She approaches these materials with care, and with attention to the ethical complexity of working with materials that do not “belong” to her.
In her own work, Chan strives to create images that acknowledge their limitations, that remain porous, and that leave space for viewers to bring their own interpretations and embodied histories. She aims to create works that remain attentive to their conditions of production, their ethical stakes, and their potential to expand the aesthetic and political vocabulary of contemporary moving-image practices. Her projects ask viewers to slow down, to look again, to listen to what persists in the gaps, and to engage with images not as answers, but as openings.
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
The creation process was 4 years in total and 1 year was during participation in a residency for artists and communities to make new films about living with HIV today called "Viral Interventions".
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
Instagram: @lesleyloksichan