Program Details
April 09, 2026
World Premiere of Cursive, a film by Serena Lee
Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
Produced by Cara Spooner
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Presented by Images Festival and DanceMakers, co-presented with Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and Gallery TPW
Photo documentation by Camille Rojas
Pairing Serena Lee’s latest film Cursive with Fan Wu’s performance-oration Spiritual Metabolism: Theses on Transmutation ELIXIR FRAME, brings together philosophical and aesthetic practices of the everyday, asking: How can we cultivate a relation of nourishment, rather than consumption, with moving images?
Extending from their years long conversation, Serena Lee and Fan Wu invite you into a space of cinematic alchemy—through images, movement, language, and breath.
In her newest video Cursive (2026), Serena documents an experiment with Chinese writing through plural perspectives and sentence fragments. Tracing language as a form of energy circulation, she asks: How can we describe the connective tissue of the world? How might we dwell in language, as movement? Cursive, then, offers glimpses of an ongoing process of working with qi “vital energy” at the intersection of martial arts, calligraphy, and dance. Starting from her grandfather’s poem, Cursive unfolds ways of reading between gesture and image, abstraction and longing.
Serena writes:
“In the years before he dies, my grandfather writes a poem of four words, again and again. In Broadview Chinatown, in his kitchen, he writes with dollar store markers four words that can be translated literally as: what, place, writing, sound. Translated indirectly the poem asks ‘Do you read me?’”
Responding in part to Serena’s film, Fan Wu will engage the audience in a participatory conversation by asking: What can we learn from Daoist and Buddhist traditions about the workings of metabolism and its alchemical potential of transmutation?
Fan shares:
“Transmutation begins with the deep acceptance of a feeling. I deny grief by ironizing it; I deny anger by setting off into a rage where I can’t feel my body any more. To transmute, we must first take in, chewing as slowly as the thing requires in order to best metabolize it in bodymind. If transcendence is the attainment of enlightenment—the soul passing over into Nirvana—then transmutation is the bringing of enlightenment into daily life. Nirvana then becomes a practice of ordinary digestion: an attitude of openness that must be sustained rather than a divine state that can at last be attained.”
Reflecting on cinema as a space of transmutation, Fan invites us to reflect on the possibility of openness, beyond contexts that often constrict us into identity and non-contradiction.
In closing ELIXIR FRAME, Serena and Fan offer a prompt for the audience to take with them over the course of the five day festival: How can we dwell in the cinematic experience as a form of nourishment? Returning to this question, Fan and Serena host Dance&Alchemy, presented in partnership with Dancemakers TO, to close the 39th Images Festival. As a relaxed, open-ended workshop, Dance&Alchemy.
We will explore
potential alchemical mixtures from the repertoires of artists Fan Wu and Serena Lee, including qigong, taijiquan, parable, calligraphy, poetry, and somatic translation.
We will begin
by grounding ourselves in space and in the presence of our bodies.
We will read
and counter-read Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” by pushing at the limits of alphabetical languages that are traditionally considered non-pictographic.
We will write
between image and word, wet and dry, light and shadow—sensing how language appears through what it omits—the negative space it’s bound to speaking.
We will follow
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Du Fu, Ikkyu—and many others in the lineage of the supple phenomenology of attention—and compose using the density of the ordinary as an ever-replenishing raw material.
