Northeast Image Roaming

Division and Reconciliation: The Geography of Images

35min, 2025, China

Yu Guo

"Division and Compromise: On the Geography of Images" is completed after an artist residency at Changbai Mountain sponsored by DRC No.12.The film interweaves multiple contextual layers and narrative trajectories. Situated within geopolitical frameworks, the artist unfolds a critical analysis that juxtaposes contemporary art production systems with the historical evolution of media technologies. These investigations remain rooted in empirical fieldwork while engaging with the tangible boundaries of the physical world—ultimately seeking to disentangle our comprehension of today’s complex realities.

About the Filmmaker

Yu Guo

Yu Guo (b. 1983, Tongjiang, Sichuan) graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2016 and currently lives and works in Chongqing. His multidisciplinary practice spans painting, video, and writing. Recently, his work has focused on the interweaving of images with texts, as well as the interplay between visible and invisible social facts.

Hostile Landscapes

60min, 2025, China&Germany

Zhang Hanwen

“Hostile Landscapes” is a two-channel film revolving around the remarkable true story of Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健/주현건/Zhu Xianjian), a North Korean defector who was imprisoned in Jilin Prison, Northeast China, since 2013, for illegal border-crossing, theft, and robbery. In October 2021, Ju escaped the prison with bare hands and managed to elude local police and authorities for 40 days before he was ultimately captured near the Fengman Dam, a historically significant location with deep Japanese colonial ties.

The film meticulously tracks Ju’s confirmed and potential hideouts, capturing the multilayered local landscapes through a series of cinematic gazes, reconstructing his fugitive odyssey while weaving in other border-crossing East Asian images and (hi)stories. Framed within the broader context of modern and contemporary East Asian history, the work reflects on Chinese/Asian identities/bodies and their entanglements with notions of sovereignty, governance, territory, infrastructure, nationalism, and colonialism.

About the Filmmaker

Zhang Hanwen

Hanwen Zhang is an artist and filmmaker originally from Changchun, China. Grounded in photography and video/film, his practice utilizes “documentary” as a self-reflexive narrative device and extends to diverse fields including sound, installation, and writing. Drawing from artistic research and fieldwork, his work employs on-site filming and visual studies to examine specific landscapes, infrastructures, and mundane human activities reflecting on the intertwined dimensions of individual conditions, stories, memories, collective narratives, archives, and identity within local, transnational, historical, or ideological contexts. His recent research revolves around the exile of marginalized individuals, the treatment of difficult heritage, and the activities of secret societies within the modern and contemporary East Asian historical framework.

Zhang holds a BS from Tsinghua University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is a German Chancellor Fellow (AvH Foundation, 2024–25) and has participated in various artist residencies and fellowship programs, including the Spreepark Art Space Residency (Berlin, 2024), Braunschweig Projects (Braunschweig, 2023), the Fosun Foundation Art Residency (Shanghai, 2021), and the BRIClab Video Art Residency (New York, 2020), among others. His debut film, The First Line of China (2020), received the SAH Award for Film and Video and was selected for the inaugural BBC LongShots online film festival. In 2025, his film Hostile Landscapes (2025) won the Grand Prize at the 39th Image Forum Festival and the Jury Prize at the 19th Busan International Video Art Festival.