Safe Trip
Co-Directed with Xiya Wang
single channel video, 11 mins 58 seconds
Co-Directed with Xiya Wang
single channel video, 11 mins 58 seconds
Safe Trip follows a Chinese paper offering figure as it drifts through liminal spaces, carrying a letter compiled from real 20th-century Chinese immigrant family correspondence. Blending fictional narrative and documentary form, the film explores diasporic memory, emotional continuity, and the spiritual ties between homeland and foreign land. Rooted in funerary traditions, these symbolic gestures evoke both the persistence and transformation of cultural practices in displacement.
Developed through sustained engagement with Chinese diasporic communities across the UK and Europe, the work examines how paper offering rituals are preserved and adapted in new cultural and geographic contexts. In these environments, such rituals are not static heritages but dynamic negotiations between grief, belief, and belonging. Safe Trip considers how practices like paper burning—once embedded in familial rites—take on new significance in diaspora, becoming tools for emotional continuity and quiet acts of cultural assertion.
The film interrogates what is remembered, who performs memory, and how ancestral connections are shaped under conditions of migration, marginalization, and cultural translation. Focusing on the lived experience of mourning and care, the film considers how ancestral rituals shape diasporic identity through loss, remembrance, and spiritual continuity.
Xiya Wang’s Degree Show Install View
Project Archive
