GHOSTS OF KOUANG-TECHÉOU-WAN

Around 1900, French colonisers arrived on China’s Leizhou Peninsula, seeking to bring an unfamiliar land into their systems of knowledge and order through scientific classification, botanical collecting and military administration. Yet the humid tropical forest, spreading disease, legends surrounding a volcanic lake and local villagers’ rituals gradually unsettled their understanding of the land.

Moving between historical archives, local legends and fictional narrative, the film revisits an obscured colonial history.

The images of Ghosts of Kouang-Techéou-Wan move across times and media. Colonial records, contemporary landscapes, archival material and digitally reconstructed images together form a world between history and imagination.

While composing for the film, I began to ask: if images can reorganise history through different media, could sound do the same?

I did not want to use regionally specific music simply to reconstruct an imagined Leizhou Peninsula of the early twentieth century. I was more interested in how different sonic materials could meet within one film, and how their differences might shape our perception of time and history.

I combined recorded acoustic instruments with electronic synthesis, sampling and digital processing, weaving together materials made through different ways of producing sound. For me, film music need not faithfully recreate the past. The encounter between media can itself become a way of perceiving history anew.