Shahzia Sikander’s Film Is Forcing Hong Kong to Revisit Its Colonial Past
It begins with a transcendental “sunburst” motif associated with divine light, which gradually dissolves into fields of poppies laced with both a sense of beauty and underlying violence, recalling the British coercion that drove Chinese opium trade and registering its darker consequences of pleasure and addiction. Across the shifting sequences of the nine-minute cycles, the…