ELIXIR FRAME

How can we cultivate a relation of nourishment, rather than consumption, with moving images? Extending from their ongoing conversation, Serena Lee and Fan Wu invite you into a space of cinematic alchemy—through images, movement, language, and breath.

This program, entitled ELIXIR FRAME, brings together philosophical and aesthetic practices of the everyday, pairing Serena Lee’s film Cursive with Fan Wu’s performance-oration Spiritual Metabolism: Theses on Transmutation. 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?’” 

Serena documents an experiment with Chinese writing through plural perspectives and sentence fragments in her newest video Cursive (2025). 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 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.

Responding in part to Serena’s Cursive, Fan 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 writes:

“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 will host Dance&Alchemy, presented in partnership with Dancemakers, to close the 39th Images Festival. As a relaxed, open-ended workshop, Dance&Alchemy will engage with elements of qigong, taijiquan, narrative meditation, calligraphy, poetry, and somatic translation.