HONG KONG.- In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol – arguably the most influential artist of the late 20th century – a select number of his films are on exhibit for the first time in Southeast Asia. Curated by artist Yason Banal and Geralyn Huxley, curator of film & video at The Andy Warhol Museum, this exhibition focuses on the artist’s seminal motion and moving pictures, from his structuralist masterpieces Empire, Sleep and Chelsea Girls to the conceptual experiments in portraiture such as the Screen Tests, Blow Job and Outer and Inner Space, as well as explorations into narrative, celebrity and archive via Imitation of Christ and Factory Diaries. The installation Silver Clouds, traversing cinema and sculpture, performance and philosophy, hovers above the exhibition.

From the time he obtained his first film camera in 1963 until his death in 1987, Warhol produced nearly 650 films that capture the cultural milieu in which he lived and worked as the cool and curious coterie of friends and acquaintances, hanging on and hanging out at his New York studio factory became the cast and the subject of his work. Warhol’s Cinema is unique; projecting from film’s grave with video transfers on to digital media, dexterous and shadowy, shy and shining, looming over and nudging Hollywood and avant-garde tastes with one minimal and durational serial-copy after another. Much like his paintings, sculptures and activities, Warhol’s Cinema inter-faces various themes, styles and worlds and has never been more powerful and illuminating – its phantasmatic glamour, perverse aesthetic and conceptual brevity continue to maintain and pass through contemporary pop life, lying between hellos and goodbyes, staying still and moving on in space and time.

Yason Banal
Yason Banal’s work moves between performance, installation, photography, video and text, taking myriad forms and conceptual strategies in order to explore, perhaps even trigger, suppressed associations and links. He obtained a BA in Film at the University of the Philippines, an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College-University of London. He is a visiting lecturer at London Metropolitan University and Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music. His works have been exhibited at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Caixa Forum, Frieze Art Fair, IFA Berlin, Courtauld Institute, Guangzhou Triennale, Singapore Biennale, Oslo Kunsthall, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and just recently at the Shanghai Biennale and Queens Museum of Art. He also teaches Experimental Cinema at the University of the Philippines and runs the concept space Strike Anyspacewhatever Trading.

Geralyn Huxley
Geralyn Huxley, Curator of Film and Video at The Andy Warhol Museum, has been a film programmer and curator since 1977. At the Warhol Museum since its opening in 1994, she has curated numerous film and video programs by Andy Warhol, as well as a Paul Morrissey retrospective and screenings of new work by other film artists. She also oversees the maintenance and preservation of the museum's extensive collection of original Warhol video tapes and is currently working on a project to digitize the complete Andy Warhol film archive. She has co-curated Warhol Museum exhibitions, including Warhol & Jackie: Crafting the End of Camelot, focusing on the hours of film footage, both home movies and unedited news coverage, that documented the assassination of John F. Kennedy and I Just Want to Watch: Warhol's Film, Video, and Television, the largest installation of Warhol film and video. She is co-author of Andy Warhol 365 Takes: The Andy Warhol Museum Collection and Andy Warhol Treasures, as well as numerous essays.