ABSTRACT
Starting from a consideration of a 1997 performance titled “Touching Father" by the Beijing-based artist Song Dong, in which Song uses a video projection of his own hand to stroke his father’s face and torso, this article then three films from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, each of which can be dated almost precisely to the same historical moment that Song Dong completed his 1997 performance. Like Song Dong, each of these works uses a focus on mediated physical contact to examine a set of conflicted relationships between pairs of male protagonists. More specifically, each work explores a dialectics of proximity and distance, intimacy and alienation—suggesting that an attention to mediated and displaced forms of contact may function as a highly meaningful and intimate form of contact in its own right.
