Just in Time: Avant-Garde Now Presents Time Travellers at M+

On 13 September 2025, the M+ Moving Image team held the fourth edition of Avant-Garde Now, a triannual one-day event supported by M+’s Major Partner, CHANEL. Each Avant-Garde Now day brings together four contemporary artists whose unique practices are contextualised in relation to each other, responding to a common theme. Avant Garde Now: Time Travellers closes out a yearlong programming cycle developed around the museum’s yearly Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival and its 2025 theme, Time Will Tell, and is the last stop before the series moves onto next year’s focus on ‘space’.

“There is a light and it never goes out.” [i]

Making your way through Time Travellers, the recent daylong event at M+ in Hong Kong, meant traversing many dark passages. Fortunately, the participating artists—Monira Al Qadiri, Cao Fei, Meiro Koizumi, and Subash Thebe Limbu—provided a guiding light through their moving image works, which included a VR experience, film screenings, a planned performance lecture, and conversations with the curators. [ii]

Certainly, as descriptors, ‘time’, ‘space’, and the ‘avant-garde’ have vast associations and draw on specific frames of reference. [iii] Here, relative to their deployment in each work, time is conceived as both subject and methodology through the artists’ many interpretative modes and use of different moving image formats. The way in which the event was strewn across various locations of the museum not only activated the site but unveiled some of the maintenance behind the magic.

Encouraging attendees to be aware of their surroundings aided their understanding of these works, and how two and three dimensions continue to merge in real time and IRL (in real life) at an unprecedented rate. For example, Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi’s Prometheus the Fire-Bringer (2023) was set up at the base of the museum’s Grand Stair auditorium. Sitting on beanbags, a rotating group of four visitors could experience Koizumi’s VR piece, and in direct proximity to the ‘real reality’ of the picturesque Hong Kong skyline visible through a bank of floor to ceiling windows on-site. By contrast, the House 1 Cinema, which held the film screenings and follow-up conversations, was more aligned to the M+ Mediatheque nearby where visitors can view single-channel works from the M+ Moving Image Collection holdings in a more intimate, darkened environment.

As such, the museum serves as its own form of worldbuilding where performative and interactive cultural programming enable more self-conscious experiences for visitors to understand how art using time can reflect ‘our time’ in many different ways. This includes Time Travellers, where time shapeshifts before our eyes and activates our senses.

Time is malleable for Subash Thebe Limbu, a Yakthung artist from present-day eastern Nepal, who screened two ‘Adivasi Futurism’ films. [iv] This included Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023) where digitally generated spaceships embellished with ancient Nepalese symbols carry two riders who contemplate their place amidst landscapes Thebe Limbu filmed using drones. These works visualise alternately sublime and scarred territories in times past and present, and considers possible futures by insisting on the need to look back before moving forward.

Similarly, the four films by Monira Al Qadiri focus on the source and trade of increasingly rare natural resources, as seen from the perspective of the Kuwaiti born, Japan-educated artist. For example, Diver (2018) finds synchronised swimmers in reflective suits performing to an ancient pearl-diving song whilst in the depths of what appears to be liquid ‘black gold’. Hearkening to the sheen of oil and pearl, Diver uncovers the socioeconomic undercurrents behind the international trade of raw materials.

Meiro Koizumi also looks back, homing in on myth through Prometheus, the Greek titan whose gift of fire enabled human intelligence. His eternal fate from Zeus? An eagle devouring his liver before another grows back and the daily cycle begins again. For the final instalment of his Prometheus Trilogy (2019–2023), Koizumi presents a sensorial vision whereby a ghostly child leads VR users into a mystical forest. There, a pair of digitised hands are absorbed into their own, turning visual artifice into lived experience.

This not only shows how much technology has imprinted itself onto our bodies but bore into what individualises us as humans—exemplified here through our fingerprints and retinae, now as digitally usurped hands and VR headset covered eyes. However, like all good storytellers, from Greek myth makers to Mary Shelley’s ‘modern Prometheus’ tale, Frankenstein (1818), these contemporary artists are time travellers who materialise how fiction is morphing into fact, while insisting on sentience regardless of outcome.

In doing so, Beijing-based artist Cao Fei goes as far as to embody the effects of technology through her characters in the science fiction film, Nova (2019). Titled after a star which brightens before its charge quickly dissipates, Cao’s film follows a similar trajectory: a science experiment goes awry, trapping a boy in time, first for 40-years, then in perpetuity. In truth, it was a conscious act by his father where once promising, then missed connections lead to inevitable longing and regret. Thus, dreaming of the future becomes a form of entrapment. This is punctuated by the real-life, now demolished Hongxia Theatre, a movie palace from Cao's youth. While inspiring the set design, it steeps Nova in melancholy and nostalgia, not unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (2004) or Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner (2017).

In looking back to look forward, these storytellers and time travellers produce an essential counterpoint to the broader field of filmmaking, where an ever-widening lens can encompass directors’ cuts, behind-the-scenes footage, or even the creation of ‘stars’ on social media. With Subash Thebe Limbu, Monira Al Qadiri, Meiro Koizumi, and Cao Fei, Time Travellers offers a creative compendium of how technology is collapsing our experiences of time. Yet, only time will tell whether (or how) we will grasp this moment—to choose to shape the human experience with openness or with ever-tighter constraints. In the end, there are no guarantees.