Matter Matters | Interview with Elsa Wong about “A Secret Portrait of Wan Hoi-Ling”

A Secret Portrait of Wan Hoi-Ling (2025) reimagines the life of Wan Hoi-Ling, a pioneering but little-known female director and screenwriter who worked across Hong Kong and Singapore, creating anti-imperialist, anti-colonial films. In this interview, artist Elsa Wong reflects on how she transposed her research into the film’s three-part narrative, working with a variety of materials and techniques, from sourcing found objects to crafting dioramas, experimenting with 16mm film, and developing a multi-language soundtrack. Seeking an alternative to stereotypical portrayals of Wan as a tragic heroine, Elsa offers the viewer an empathetic vision of a woman moving through love, ambition, and loss.

This interview was conducted on August 14, 2025 by AFA film programmer and curator Natalie Khoo and writer Sheryl Gwee. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

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SHERYL: What drew you to the story of Wan Hoi-Ling, who takes centre stage in your installation?

ELSA: I was really drawn to her story because of how active she was during a very short period of time. Then she disappeared. I read more into it and realised that Wan Hoi-Ling had worked with Hou Yao, as his apprentice. They made many films together and then came to Singapore, where they were stuck because of the Japanese Occupation. It was a very tragic story. The Japanese wanted Hou Yao to make propaganda films, but he refused, so he was executed. Wan Hoi-Ling was imprisoned. 

Years after she was imprisoned, she made two more films, in Singapore. Then she went back to Hong Kong and eventually disappeared. I was intrigued by what she might have been experiencing emotionally, because so much had happened. I began imagining the kind of story I could create around her, as well as the scenarios themselves—the interiors, the landscapes, her perspective, what she might have been feeling. I could picture the details within the frame.

 

SHERYL: Your initial sketches showed a three-channel video installation, which has now evolved into a single-channel projection. Could you tell us more about how you developed the three-part structure of the film?

ELSA: In my research, I noticed three very distinct timelines. The interviews and essays written about Wan Hoi-Ling often went through her filmography to describe both her personal life and her career. They structured it around the films she made during different periods of her life.

So, I began to see it as three parts: first, her time with her partner, when they were making films together. The films from that period were very optimistic and future-oriented.

Then came the second part, when she was alone. The films she made during that time reflected her personal struggles and had a very different tone—more serious and sombre than those she created with her partner.

The third part was when she began to disappear. During this time, she wrote one last script called Love Torn (dir. Kao Li, released 1963), which I thought was a very poetic, all-encompassing title that spoke to her journey across the first two parts.

SHERYL: What about the techniques that you used, such as 16mm film? How did you conceptualise the visuals in relation to the turbulent emotions that she might have been feeling?

ELSA: I went back and forth deciding between portraying the story through live action or through miniatures. I started with a model for the first part, and after making it, I felt a personal touch between me and the object. I don’t personally know Wan Hoi-Ling, but through creating the film, I began to feel a certain closeness to her. So, I decided to use objects to represent different parts of the script.

The film is composed of still-lifes and miniatures, and I chose to shoot it on 16mm. It was quite a challenge because 16mm took much longer, especially with lighting. Most of it had to be a one-take, though I would sometimes shoot a safety. Still, I committed to 16mm because it was a medium used during her time, and I thought it would add to the experience of filming. So much of their work was shot on film, and some of it has been lost—there’s something about the object of the film reel itself that I wanted to bring into this work.

Most of the 16mm was shot on my own, which brought a certain loneliness. When I was arranging the miniatures and moving the cutout of Wan Hoi-Ling around, it was a strange feeling. She wasn’t really present in what I was making, but I felt as though a version of her that I imagined was there. There was a strange sense of both connection and disconnection.

SHERYL: It’s almost as if you’re trying to bridge the gap in time between her story and yours. From what you’ve shared, there’s also a sense of empathy—of you really trying to understand what she was going through.

ELSA: Yeah, that’s a good word, because I don’t think anyone knows what she was truly like as a person, other than that she was very ambitious. I think her ambition, and perhaps her optimism, allowed her to continue after the war. 

 

SHERYL: Could you tell me more about the kinds of motifs that you selected? 

ELSA: One of the first images that kept popping into my mind while planning the scenes was confetti. I kept thinking about the almost euphoric feeling of confetti floating in the air—it creates a climactic sense of joy. But there’s also a point where the confetti falls to the ground, and it evokes a very sad feeling, like the party is over.

The confetti mainly symbolises celebration, a sense of a party, which I wanted to emphasise in the first part. It represents Wan and Hou enjoying their time together—working, creating. Then, when the confetti fades and they sweep it away, it becomes metaphorical, reflecting how that happy, celebratory era has passed.

 

SHERYL: What about the double exposures?

ELSA: I wanted to create a physical overlay of different objects and visuals, symbolically tying them together. The double exposures of confetti, and sometimes of lights, allowed me to experiment with how these elements could seep into another layer of the 16mm film. It was about physically burning these images into the first layer I shot, whether that was a miniature or another object, creating a tactile, layered effect.

SHERYL: What were the other found objects that you used?

ELSA: Besides the miniatures, I also represented Wan and Hou through personal objects, like their shoes. The placement of the objects carried meaning. For example, a pair of shoes sprawled on the floor alongside scripts, indicating that something tragic had happened to Wan and that a part of her had “disappeared” into her work.

Besides using the miniature figures, I wanted to show Wan and Hou together in the frame, physically, using personal objects to evoke presence. For Hou, I included a pair of round glasses similar to the ones in his photos. One particularly difficult scene involved representing his death. I debated between a literal depiction of violence or a more metaphorical approach. Ultimately, I chose to place a pool of blood around his cracked glasses, subtly indicating that violence and death had affected him.

 

SHERYL: I think it’s interesting that you use the shoes, without including a person. There’s a sense of loss and it reflects the act of imagining something that exists only in the gaps, especially since so many of Wan and Hou’s films are not accessible. What do you think you’ve gained through this exploration of the gaps in film history?

ELSA: Because there was a lack of information, I was allowed to be very imaginative. It’s interesting that you point out that there are no people; some scenes have just hands. The scenes with clothing but without people—they’re like ghosts.

When I first watched one of the films AFA shared with me, Spirit of the Overseas Chinese (dir. Wan Hoi-Ling, 1946), I felt a very strange awakening. The language was hard to understand without subtitles because it was in Mandarin, Hokkien, and some other dialects. At the same time, a lot of the landscapes depicted were the Singapore I recognised from photos, but not exactly one I had lived in. I felt a disconnect between myself and those time periods.

I gained a lot by learning about Singapore and Hong Kong, and about how Malay films were pioneering in Singapore in the 1930s. Wan and Hou were invited to make films in Singapore, which was interesting to learn about, along with how the Shaw Brothers initially wanted to make Malay films before moving more into Chinese films.

Prior to this project, I didn’t know of Wan Hoi-Ling’s existence. Reading different essays about her, I realised they all have very limited information. They often describe her in a very sad way, ending with the idea that she couldn’t handle the trauma from the war in Singapore and eventually, the loss of love. It’s almost as if she were a woman who didn’t have her own voice. Whether or not that was true, I decided to write her story in a way that left things with a question mark. She contemplates whether she really is feeling sad. There was something about her which was optimistic, as a survivor. As a woman during that time, parts of her were more adaptable towards things around her.

 

SHERYL: So it’s about looking at a female perspective, which was silenced by these narratives that have reduced her to a very stereotypical tragic figure.

ELSA: Yeah, a very tragic figure. Sometimes, when you’re very connected to your creative work, you want to be at the centre of it and push it forward. But she did all of that within a few years and then decided to take a step back. She didn’t want to be in interviews or push her work anymore. I felt like she was very passionate about what she was writing, but maybe she had nothing else to write about anymore.

 

NATALIE: What about Wan stood out the most to you, or were there other unexpected things you found interesting during your research? 

ELSA: I think it was still the fact that she disappeared. That was very intriguing. I was thinking, would I ever want to disappear? Even if people offered me work—directing or writing scripts—would I still step back? 

In my script, I imagined that she might have spent her later years in her garden, maybe teaching students, or doing other things in her life. Even during the Occupation in Singapore, she was resourceful—she opened her own coffee shop for business. I felt that part of her would have definitely carried on after her disappearance, doing things connected to her stories, but also reflecting her personality outside of filmmaking.

 

NATALIE: Yeah, that’s also interesting—the role of creative labour. Is that something you’ve been thinking about too?

ELSA:  Yeah. Filmmaking really forces you to be present—you have to talk about it and be there so someone knows who’s behind the film. For a film to be historically recorded or archived, your name needs to be there, somewhere. With projects that we’ve worked on, we want to be credited really badly. But it’s almost like she decided that she doesn’t care about it. This made me think about how important archiving is. 

 

NATALIE: It’s almost like Wan Hoi-Ling resisted being archived.

ELSA: Yeah, maybe because so much of her was archived before. She realised, and decided, “No, I want to write my own story.”

 

NATALIE: I was also curious about your practice, obsessions, and interests in the past few years, and how this commission connects to your practice. You’ve done a lot—fashion, set design, film in a traditional sense, even programming, curating.

ELSA: I would say over the years, I’ve realised my work is always very emotionally driven. Regardless of whether I write the story first or plan scenarios, I always think about the colours, textures, and the emotions. Even for this film, I imagined Wan Hoi-Ling in every scene, what she would feel, which parts of her body would be in the frame—her back, her hands, hyper close-up moments. I do think my background in fashion influenced this, making me very attentive to details. Whenever I plan a photo or film, there are always a lot of details I fixate on within the frame.

I also made another similar film with miniatures, but that one had people and scenes inside. But this one is mostly purely object-based, with close-ups on colours. Over the last two or three years, I’ve really gotten into prop-making and set designing, so I fixated on making everything very still. Adding to the fact that it’s all from my imagination, I translated what’s in my mind into a tangible version—a 3D version of it.

 

NATALIE: Maybe we can talk a bit about objects, then. Since you’ve been involved in prop design, which particular objects were you drawn to, or what kinds of props were you referencing?

ELSA:  I would say in general, if I’m not making the props myself, I like found objects—it could be a brush, a small glass container—things that have been used by someone else. I feel like there’s already a strong personality in these objects that I can attach to the film I’m making. Even if I don’t know the purpose at first, I eventually find a symbolic meaning for it.

Sometimes, when I envision a prop or do set design, I don’t immediately understand why the image came to mind. Only after making it do I see why—it makes sense in the colours and textures. But during the process, it’s almost tunnel vision. I’m completely focused on the object and its role in the scene. I get very fixated, and I just have to see it through to the end and do it.

These are the shoes I used to represent Wan Hoi-Ling. It’s a very simple pair of shoes, but when I saw it at the thrift store, it struck me. It’s classic, something someone would wear in the 1930s, but at the same time, there’s something very blank about it. I can imagine the person wearing it, but it also leaves room for other imagination, because it’s white.

 

NATALIE: It’s almost like a screen that you can project onto.

ELSA: Exactly. I wanted everything to feel staged, emphasising the idea that these aren’t real events but my own projection of what I think she felt.

NATALIE: You’ve been in New York for the last three years now. Would you like to share about the evolution of your practice?

ELSA: Working between Singapore and New York, I almost wish I was in Singapore making the film. Making it here [in New York] felt different. Even if I wanted to do outdoor scenes, there was almost no way—the landscape and the visual inspiration from the environment here were very different, which is why I said it felt quite lonely making it. If I had been at home, I think I would have come up with the same story, but it might have felt different making it. Here, I was mostly working inside my home. I thought maybe I could shoot outdoors, and one day I went around a park I really like, but it just looked so different. Even if I tried to fake it, the feeling wasn’t there.

Even Chinatown here would look too different. It has become a big melting pot—a mesh of different parts of Chinese culture coming together. Also, it’s very recognisable, because so many people shoot in Manhattan’s Chinatown. If someone looked at it, they’d immediately know it was New York.

 

NATALIE: In Juliet’s Dinner, you used a similar language of dioramas, but it was a music video. You had an actor, a human figure, and in your fashion work you also shoot a lot of people. But with this work, there aren’t any people. Is that something you like, shooting more props, or is it quite different?

ELSA: I still like shooting half-and-half—with props and with people interacting with them. But for this project, I kept contemplating whether I wanted to shoot an actual sequence with people. At the same time, I felt I couldn’t do Wan Hoi-Ling justice if I shot a person. That’s why it had to be purely imagined. If I wanted it to exist in the space of imagination, I needed to fully commit to building a model of her within the miniatures and finding different objects.

It was also a good challenge that made me dive into the relationship between object and emotion—how to create consistent visual clues throughout the scenes so the audience recognises that this object represents this person, and another object represents someone else.

NATALIE: Could you share more about these object–emotion connections?

ELSA: For example, the confetti was something I was really drawn to. I watched a film that had a party sequence filled with confetti in the air. There was a never-ending, celebratory feeling, but it also seemed fake, like an orchestrated moment. When I got the confetti, I saw that the reflective parts were very interesting to capture. So much of Wan Hoi-Ling’s filmmaking was about light—light burning into the film. I wanted to carry that into my work, letting those specks of light run continuously through the film. With confetti, sequins, and light projection. 

To represent them, I relied on photos because there’s no footage of Wan Hoi-Ling and Hou Yao. In her photo, I couldn’t see much beyond her face and the upper half of her body, so I had to imagine what she was wearing and what people wore at that time. Since her photos were in black and white, I imagined the colours and patterns. One interview described her as very brightly dressed and upbeat, so I put her in bright colours throughout.

 

NATALIE: Where was this interview from?

That interview came from an anti-Chinese article that included an excerpt from a Chinese newspaper called Yu Le (娱乐). I couldn’t find the original online, but the article had a section where they interviewed her and other filmmakers or artists during the Japanese Occupation about what they were doing and how they felt about the film industry. They described her as brightly dressed, upbeat, and teaching a student—even though she only had one.

  

NATALIE: You mentioned certain anecdotes, but was there anything unexpected you discovered in the process of creating the work?

ELSA: Even in her interviews, she seemed almost unfazed—not unfazed, but very unaffected—about what had happened to her. What shocked me was realising that Wan Hoi-Ling and Hou Yao went through the war in Singapore. They were invited to Singapore to make films, and then, eventually, almost by fate, what happened to them happened. I kept thinking, what if they hadn’t gone to Singapore? What if they had stayed in Hong Kong? Would it have been a very different story, a very different history, for her? But fate had it that they went to Singapore—he died, and that shaped her story. I wanted to highlight that in the script: toward the end, it’s less about the tragedy and more about her accepting that it was destined, something inevitable.

 

NATALIE: If you had to summarise your work in three words, what would they be

ELSA: “Emotional” is one of them. 

 

NATALIE: That emotive connection is what brings in the human element—even though we never see a human, the emotion is still human.

ELSA: Yes. I’d also say it’s “ghostly”. At times, when making the miniatures of her, I felt a certain presence, a certain pressure, because I was representing her in different ways. I kept asking myself, would she say this, would she do this? I couldn’t know for sure, but it had to feel close to the specific kinds of films she made.

I’m trying to think of a last word, maybe something for the still-life aspect, like the props.

 

NATALIE: I’m also thinking more about the technique, the dollhouse aspect—the craftiness of it. There’s a very tactile, handmade feel to the work. The sets look theatrical and playful.

ELSA: Yes, it ties back to the installation. I thought so much about the installation before even considering the visuals for the film, and in the end, the two had a really nice connection.

 

NATALIE: Yes, it’s very theatrical. The backdrop of the Great Wall theme park had lots of performances, so the way it’s set also feels that way.

ELSA: So maybe that’s the word: “theatrical”. Because so much of it is a staged and performed sequence.

When I was making the work, I felt this pressure to do her justice. Not that I saw or felt her ghost, but her image was ingrained in my mind—that one photo of her.

SHERYL: You felt the weight of representing her in a way that would be true to what she was?

NATALIE: Her spirit.

ELSA: Yeah, almost like her spirit. When I was thinking of a title for the work, I went through a few ideas. I considered “the ghost of her” but it didn’t feel right. Eventually, I chose the word “secret,” because so much of what I imagined felt like her secret life, behind her films, that nobody knew about.

 

SHERYL: The person behind the public persona.

NATALIE: What do you hope audiences will gain from your work?

ELSA: I hope they learn about her. Not a lot of people do. When friends ask me about the project and I tell them about this filmmaker, everyone is intrigued by her story—especially the fact that she disappeared. I think audiences can gather that even though we know so much about her through her filmography, there’s also a real side of her that we’ll never be able to get to.

We can only imagine those periods of time and how others around her felt, which might have informed how she felt. As a woman in the 1930s, it was definitely difficult. Then, the war was difficult. 1960s Hong Kong would have been very different too. I even asked my grandparents about it, since they lived through that time, and they gave me insight into how they felt—you just had to keep going, be very adaptable. Maybe that was how she felt too.

  

NATALIE: I find the use of found objects very interesting because you’re assembling all these random things to call to mind the memory of a person we don’t really know much about. And with the objects, you also don’t know who used to own them.

ELSA: Exactly. It’s a lot of lost-and-found. The sculptures in the sketches are very abstract, but for the final version, I was deciding whether to create something entirely new or use the found objects. I think I’ll bring the found objects back, either displaying them directly or integrating them into a sculpture within the installation.

  

NATALIE: Reflecting on your practice, this work has a strong emotional element, which recurs in your work, but also introduces new aspects, like the use of objects, sets without people, found footage, and celluloid. The “lost-and-found” theme appears both in a material and textural form, which feels fresh. The artists in this project have interpreted the idea of lost film in very different ways. Because of your background in set design and fashion, it comes across in a very tactile, textural way, which is really nice to see.

ELSA: The film part is interesting because when both of us tried to look for more of her films, it was really difficult to find anything that wasn’t with Hou Yao. So having the physical reel for her felt almost like something being found.

I have another roll of film I want to use for the found footage—burn it onto the film and see what that would look like. I did one experiment where I played a moving image on my computer screen and filmed it using the Bolex camera. I’m interested to see how that translates on film—what it captures and how it looks.

 

NATALIE: I was just thinking about the textural and tactile quality of Hou Yao’s silent film, A Poet from the Sea (1927).

ELSA: And also the colours. It had a lot of double exposures. That’s something special about the Bolex—you can rewind in-camera and shoot over it, then go back again. I tried that a couple of times, so we’ll see what comes out. It’s always tricky. The sound of the Bolex is also very specific. While shooting alone and hearing the film constantly, I imagined how they would have worked at that time. It felt as if I had staged myself in the same scenario—winding the film, shooting it, listening only to the sound of the film reel running.

 

NATALIE: Are you constructing a soundtrack for the film? What are your current thoughts on that?

ELSA: There is a voiceover. I have a friend from Singapore with a very nice, contemplative voice, and I want her to voice Wan Hoi-Ling. Her name is Karen. She’s not in the film industry, but she’s someone I met here. She’s Southern Chinese, and her family moved to Singapore from China around that time. Talking to her felt like a nice connection to have.

The script is in English because my Chinese isn’t great. I considered translating it to Chinese, but I realised there might be a disconnect if someone else translated it. So, we decided that on the day of recording, we’d workshop some parts in Mandarin and some in Hokkien. I’m trying to reflect what they might have spoken at the time—Cantonese, Mandarin, or Hokkien, representing the spirit of overseas Chinese.

Karen speaks a little Hokkien, which is perfect. We’ll keep some lines in English, since some parts come from my imagination. The three languages can create a kind of disconnection and connection between what is real and what is imagined.

I came to this conclusion about three different languages or voices because I was talking with a friend who had to translate scripts recently. They had watched a film titled Việt and Nam (dir. Trương Minh Quý, 2024), and we were talking about how language is fluid—because of translation, subtitles, and the original language, there’s always an added layer. It’s never one-to-one, which is how I felt while watching Spirit of the Overseas Chinese.

I had to watch Wan Hoi-Ling’s film with my grandfather because I couldn’t catch everything. The film had no subtitles. I understood some of it, but sometimes the delivery of emotions in Hokkien felt inaccurate—they could say something happy, but the delivery was fierce. My grandfather helped interpret. He explained that the story is very sad, about the hardships of people who migrated to Singapore from China, and that it was true to his time. It was interesting to watch with someone who understood the language more. He was like a translator for me.

 

NATALIE: That’s amazing. When you say language is fluid, I feel that’s relevant to the work. I read somewhere that Wan Hoi-Ling was often thought to be a man. There’s a certain gender fluidity to it. As a woman making films in a male-dominated industry back then, it would have been very different.

ELSA: I wrote it into the script—she knew that to be a part of the film industry, she needed to work with a man. That man became her partner. She was very driven; she knew she needed to be mentored by an established man because historical records centred on him. Her name appears too, but there’s more information about him. It’s my imagination, but I think a part of her knew that that might be what she had to do.

Natalie: I’m really excited to see the work come together. Thank you so much for today.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.