Interview with Duo Lin
Duo Lin at her solo show MARE at Galerie Hoang Beli, Paris
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Exhibition
INTERVIEW WITH DUO LIN BY LAURA DAY WEBB
Having grown up in China and the U.S., and now working between Paris and New York, how has moving between these cultural contexts shaped your perspective as a filmmaker and artist?
I travel between China, New York, and Paris—not merely crossing geographies but inhabiting different emotional climates. In this liminal space, I’ve learned to listen for the subtle consonance that links cultures. It reveals itself as whispers of shared longing, the ache for home, the delicate negotiation of identity. Here, belonging is not a place but a feeling, and my own identity has become beautifully porous, alive in its ambiguity.
Your five years working alongside Wong Kar-wai must have been formative. What did you take away from that experience artistically, but also in terms of discipline and vision that continues to influence your own work today?
My five years with Wong Kar‑wai were like an apprenticeship in the unsayable. He taught me to find my own voice—not through imitation, but through fearless writing. He insisted that honesty is the only language that can be heard, that the life you feel must be mirrored in your work. He built each scene with devotion and demanded uncompromising integrity: if you’re stepping into creation, step fully. Working with him felt less like a film set and more like a sacred ritual—through his gentle rigor, I understood how cinema could cradle hope, sharpen empathy, and become a vessel for collective memory.
Your most recent exhibition at Galerie Hoang Beli in Paris entitled, MARE originated from a vivid dream during a period when you felt estranged from your body. How did that personal sense of disconnection become the foundation for the dreamlike, fragmented world we see in the exhibition?
MARE began as a fragment of a dream, coalescing from a moment of deep estrangement—from my body, my self, my past. I shot the short film in my twenties in New York, driven by a wordless impulse. Only later did I begin to recognize it as an echo: a mediation on femininity, fear, desire and existence. The dream kept coming back, same yet changed, until I had to let it speak. In the exhibition, that dream takes fragile form—through shifting images, fractured sound, fragmented presence. It is a kind of resurrection, spoken in the quiet, porous language of the unconscious.
The work explores the contradictions of the body, sensual yet strange, fragile yet powerful. How do you see MARE speaking to broader questions of identity and the external gaze, particularly around women’s bodies?
In MARE, bodies are not objects but vessels of consciousness—reflections of you and me, present simultaneously. That is why I built mirrored surfaces into the work: the spectator meets themselves in the other. This is not critique, nor celebration of beauty. It is an invitation to bear witness. These figures are not styled, poetic, or ideal—they are organic, abstract, hovering between forms. It is a gaze that waits, untethered by judgment, a Zen pause in movement—choosing vulnerability over spectacle.
Your work often grapples with memory, dislocation, and liminal states, whether in gallery installations or films like Some Rain Must Fall. How do you see MARE extending or deepening those explorations?
Rewatching my early footage was like opening a door long sealed in memory. Time collapsed—what was past becomes present tense. In shaping MARE, I arranged fragments like puzzle pieces, not to reconstruct truth, but to honor perception itself—twisted, selective, graceful. The flow is neither chronological nor literal—it drifts, pauses, and dissolves, until the waking world feels strange with its own clarity. In this half-dream, I live between what was and what might yet be.
You were recently named a “Writer to Watch” at Canneseries, which highlights your voice as a world-builder. How do you envision building new worlds in your upcoming projects? Are you leaning toward film, immersive installation, or somewhere in between?
I dream of building worlds that breathe in space, where film and installation collide in the threshold between physical and idea. Imagine walking into a film that breathes around you—rhythm, light, memory sculpting the air. My next work lives here, between cinematic pulse and spatial poetry. In that place, the invisible becomes palpable, and the personal becomes shared. It is intimate geography, mapped in shadow and silence.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
