2025 (in post)
digitized 16mm colour, sound, 15’47”
‘China Girl’ was a term that was used since the 1920s to describe models who held colour swatches for film laboratories to test and control the exposure and colour balance of the film reels. The role they played were made integral to the film production process and their frames were used in every commercially produced film shot on celluloid film all over the world. They were “almost always female, young, conventionally attractive, and, despite the racial connotations of the name, white,” (Genevieve Yue) with their white skin used to ‘balance’ the skin tone of the entire film. The origin of its name is rooted in orientalist stereotypes; that they appeared as porcelain mannequins, the colourful dresses they wore, the submissive behaviour of the models, and the makeup and hairstyles of models.
This short experimental film depicts a fictional ‘China Girl’ breaking out of the orientalist, patriarchal gaze of film, from its materiality and production, to its systems of representation. Historically, these models were unknown, nameless women that would be pasted into the beginning of all projected film reels, occassionally seen by audiences as a flash if the projector light was turned on too early. The protagonist examines the role she has played in the history of this medium, representing what has been concealed and overlooked, as she searches for her place in film; a meta exploration of visbility, narrative, racial capitalism, and film materiality.