Honey Milk Before Bed(2024) is a diptych audio-reactive film tackling the complexity of post-colonialism and its relation to identity and traumatophobia. The film positions a pendulum swinging between innocence born out of childhood and oppression, trauma and the “whitening” of my adolescence in post-colonial Hong Kong.

 

One side of the film displays a graph that reacts to an audio recording of the Hong Kong Handover Ceremony in 1997. The graph dances to the audio while simultaneously creating feedback that displaces and distorts the DouYin makeup transformation compilation in the background. The DouYin videos are passive, devoid of agency, and freely wrenched and deformed by the graph. While the influencers in the DouYin video are putting on makeup to transform into looks that resemble white women, they are oblivious to their perception of beauty being the aftermath of colonialism, a Eurocentric colourism that was seeped into generations of our skin. 

 

The opposite side of the installation shows a similar graph, still manipulated by the audio from the Handover Ceremony; however, the movements show a slight struggle. The resistance against the manipulations came from the unopenable .wlmp files from YouTube projects when I was a teenager. My desire to become a Western YouTuber who speaks perfect English is demonstrative of post-colonial Hong Kong’s attitude towards the West. Given our complicated relationship with China and the UK, the normalisation of fetishising the imperialist West fractures my concept of national identity.