Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2026: Xu Bing - Dragonfly Eyes

Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2026: Space Enter Shift

Experience the profound intersection of art, technology, and surveillance at the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2026, held at the M+ Museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. This year's festival, themed "Space Enter Shift," continues a year-long exploration of spatial concepts through a curated series of films, performances, and talks.

Featured Screening: Xu Bing - Dragonfly Eyes (2017)

We are proud to present Xu Bing's debut feature film, Dragonfly Eyes. In a radical approach to cinematic storytelling, the artist dispenses with traditional filming methods—there are no actors, no cameramen, and no staged scenes. Instead, the entire narrative is constructed from thousands of hours of public surveillance footage.

Through an intricate montage, Xu Bing weaves a poignant love story about a young woman named Dragonfly, who leaves her life as a novice at a nunnery to work in a high-tech industrial farm, where she falls in love with a technician named Ke Fan. The film forces us to question the blurred boundaries between the public and private, the real and the constructed, and the ethics of the omnipresent 'gaze' in contemporary society.

Related Programmes & Sessions

• Post-screening Talk: Immediately following the film, audiences are invited to a deep-dive session with the artist. The talk will be conducted in Putonghua with English simultaneous interpretation. This is a rare opportunity to discuss the film’s unique production methodology and its implications for modern surveillance culture directly with Xu Bing.

Festival Logistics & Tickets

• Date & Time: 29 May 2026, 5:30 PM – 7:20 PM.
• Venue: M+ Cinema, House 1.
• Ticketing: Tickets for the festival are available starting 24 April 2026. You may purchase a Festival Pass ($750) for access to all programmes, or individual screening tickets. M+ Members and Patrons enjoy exclusive pricing at $600 for the Festival Pass. Please visit the official M+ website or the WestK ticketing page for bookings.

Don't miss this opportunity to engage with one of the most innovative visual artists of our time in the dedicated environment of the M+ Cinema.