Presented by FOST Gallery

Departing from artist Sim Chi Yin’s search for traces of her paternal grandfather’s fate as an anti-colonial activist in the Cold War, The Mountain That Hid takes us on a speculative journey exploring the spectres of colonialism, flows of migration, and the circularity of time and histories. A journalist and educator in British Malaya — present-day Malaysia and Singapore — Sim’s grandfather was among some 30,000 leftist Malayans (predominantly ethnic Chinese) deported by the British colonial administration to China during the “Malayan Emergency” (1948-1960) when a Communist-led insurgency tried to end colonial rule. In this short two-channel film, she imagines his journey into exile and his eventual death, conjuring the past from sites of memory. She went looking for history’s traces, but instead has a serendipitous encounter with a group of gossipy, selfie-snapping Chinese hikers whose conversations strike uncanny notes on the presence of the camera and on time travel.