Pirated: a post asian perspective

Artists:   Kathy Aoki  Michael Arcega  Curtis Choy  Derek Chung  Gloria G. Galang  Donna Keiko Ozawa  Indigo Som  Stephanie Syjuco thuy tran  Scott Tsuchitani Mel Vera Cruz  Lauren M. Wong  |   About Pirated Curators Main

CURTIS CHOY

Bio

CURTIS CHOY has been an independent producer and film worker since the early ‘70s. He has contributed to numerous independent and PBS documentaries, commercials, and feature films as a production sound mixer. When not losing money on his projects, he earns a living working on corporate jobs and feature films. His work as a producer/director include “The Fall of the I Hotel” (1983), “Manilatown Lives!” (1985), “Dupont Guy: The Shiz of Grant Avenue” (1976), and “Making Up” (1974). His new documentary, “What’s Wrong with Frank Chin?” (2005) premiered at NAATA’s 23rd San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and won the Best Documentary Feature Award. Choy received the James D. Phelan Art Award in Filmmaking (1988) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship (2002). His films have garnered numerous prizes and honors.

Project Statement “Making Up” is a short film produced in 1974. In hindsight, its message appears to be timeless. It re-purposes the written advice from cosmetics manufacturer Max Factor in Volume One, Number One of Jade Magazine (a purported Asian American publication), essentially instructing yellow women in the fine points of looking white, and appealing to whites. It employs a form little-understood by AA academia: satire. This work was created on the spur of the moment, with no script and no planning, and co-invented by the actresses (from a scene and set from my film essay “Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue”), using shortends (leftover film), and completed and viewable within a day. It runs less than three minutes and is wholly unambiguous.

Asian women attempt to be western-eyezed in "Making Up", 1974, by Curtis Choy.