Mysterial Power

53 min. video, 2002; 4-channel video installation, 9 min. loop, 1998-2002

Mysterial Power documents the struggle between the filmmaker as observer and participant in the field of her Taiwanese family’s daily life and religious practice. Lin’s adolescent cousin, who communicates with one of the Taiwanese local gods, inspired the project and becomes its absent center. The figure of the spiritual medium acts as a translator between different categories of experience. As one who mediates between the strange and familiar, she offers a shifting vantage point from which to view cultural constructions of knowledge, belief, and reality.