Heritage Architecture

Directed by Lily Jue Sheng

Pedestrian scenes recorded in the background of larger ongoing projects while passing through Shanghai, Keelung, Taipei, and Taoyuan. Culture is not just measured in time and travel to the historic place(s) marked by heritage or mediated cinema. The paradox of culture, one affectively caught up in the familiar and alien, and architecture itself lays bare the very infrastructure we call culture. The film fell together walking Hongkou, where my family is from – looking up old spots, finding eminent domain streets instead. In Taiwan, we encounter deities’ birthdays, street vendors, and A Maiden’s Prayer littering streets all year round. Congregations encompassing the passionately devoted, as well as those bored and impatiently melting under the sun, come to perform this act called spiritual life to captive audiences – which cannot be distilled to geography or god-fearing seen on the surface, but ebbs and flows as money changes hands and interests over generations.