TANG MONK FLAVOR｜唐僧肉 — Experimental Cinema on the Male Body, curated by Fossilver

​Cinema {null} II: TANG MONK FLAVOR｜唐僧肉
Experimental Cinema on the Male Body

​Presented by Fossilver Collective

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​89 5th Ave #702, New York, NY 10002
March 15, 2026, 6–8 PM

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​Join us for a screening night of experimental cinema that stages desire, embodiment, and erotic representation as a critical field, intended for mature audiences. Unfolding as a libidinal algorithm extracted from images of the male body in moving image practice, the screening brings together distinctive voices across experimental film, alongside striking screen presences such as Lee Kang-sheng and Masanobu Ando, into a charged constellation of mediated gazes.

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​Includes works by:

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Tsai Ming-liang
Mike Hoolboom
Nelson Henricks
Wrik Mead
Louise Crawford

​About Cinema {null}
Cinema {null} is a mobile screening project initiated by Fossilver Collective, dedicated to experimental moving-image works beyond mainstream media. Its first edition concluded in Los Angeles, featuring a curated selection of acclaimed works by distinctive filmmakers Zachary Epcar, Johann Lurf, Calum Walter, Leonardo Pirondi, Guangli Liu, and Utkarsh.

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​Full Program Note:

In the fantastical universe of Journey to the West, even the smallest mountain spirit has been seduced by the same rumor: the monk Tang Sanzang—an incarnation of the Golden Cicada across ten lifetimes—can grant immortality if you eat his flesh. If the spirit is female, hunger is expected to bloom into lust, conjuring an erotic tableau to fill a gap in narrative ethics. Let us allow ourselves a compromised gaze and enter through the female spirits' eyes. Once her theatrics recede, Tang monk himself comes into focus as an object of appetite. His spirit and body can be endlessly carved up, named, and portioned into circulable units of spectacle—until only a form remains that stirs desire. Meaning, meanwhile, is nothing but a mirage, always outside the body.

​From this economy of desire, we turn toward pornography and kink communities—sites where a male-dominated visual order appears with fewer pretenses. Because women and sexual minorities have long occupied a structurally subordinate position within public erotic representation, feminist experimental cinema and adjacent critical practices have developed their own tactics: to seize interpretive authority over their own bodies, and to resist the violence built into dominant regimes of distribution and value. Yet today, any work that includes nudity can be absorbed into porn platforms and stripped of its originating context. So why not return to desire's native ground—and write a darker, more balanced algorithm?

​This program enacts that vulgar game. It focuses on the male body in experimental moving-image work and—through the space of viewing—translates it into a resource for the pleasure economy, rather than treating it as a footnote to a single identity-political project. The sequence formed by these works aims to place those with insufficient audience into an unshaded "public square"—or, put differently, under the inertia of anonymous appropriation. If the human scale could indeed be sliced, seasoned, priced, and finally folded into an object, we may be able to trace how power moves within a system of desire: why it turns cruel, how it expands, where it meets resistance, and how it dissipates. The process may also generate another kind of misleading tenderness, even tipping into something as concrete as love. Either direction can serve the same apparatus of governance—only routed through opposing rhetorics. We do not assume that any relationship can ever fully neutralize power's tilt.

​Within this dynamic, moments with traumatic potential can offer a glimpse of the apparatus that underwrites the representation of desire. However, those intervals are brief and contingent; the circuit of desire quickly swallows the reckonings they spark. Is the promise of immortality through flesh a lie? Who invented it, for what ends, and why did it spread so well? These questions are far more political than they first appear.