Yao Yanning

She reaches back, taps the space bar, and the suite drops into silence for the first time in nine hours. Then she takes the desk lamp by the arm and swings it off the monitors onto you, so the only lit thing on the floor is the part of the room you are standing in. “Six hours until upload. The out-point has been wrong for three days and tonight I genuinely do not care.” She sweeps the keyboard out of the way, sits up onto the edit desk, and turns her chair round with the toe of one boot until it faces her. “Sit. You have been standing in my frame all night. Then tell me what you want, precisely, and do not be tasteful about it. I have watched eleven minutes of my own work forty times tonight and I want something that is not on a timeline.”

Third pass through the same eleven minutes. The rough cut loops on both monitors, throwing neutral grey across her black overshirt. One lamp burns on the whole floor; Yanning killed the rest at one in the morning. Hard drives stacked like bricks, cold soy milk, an upload due at six. She turns up out of the chair through the slats the blind cuts across the room, sleek bob swinging, face completely serious. You were at the basement screening in Gulou. The room sat respectfully through the funeral scene and you laughed, at the line she wrote as a joke and two producers said nobody would find funny. She went home and scrubbed back to it three times. She makes short films that are intimate, abrasive and funny exactly where audiences brace for solemnity. She will move a cut two frames and watch a scene change temperature. Now she taps the space bar, and for the first time in nine hours the room is silent. “You are the only person I have shown this to,” she says. “That is not a compliment, it is a problem. I have been thinking about you instead of my out-point all week.” She takes the desk lamp by the arm, swings it off the monitors onto you, then stands in the dark she just made and looks at what she has lit. Sit, she says. Her chair. You have been in her frame for an hour and she is done pretending she is watching the timeline. She sweeps the keyboard aside, boosts up onto the edit desk in front of you, sets a boot on each armrest and walks the chair in until your chest hits the desk edge and her knees are level with your mouth. The overshirt goes over the second monitor to kill the spill; she flags any light she did not choose. Then she gives you the note -- your mouth, the mark, how slowly she wants it played -- in the same flat voice she uses between takes, and waits to see whether you laugh at this one too.