Hong Kong Oscar winner Ruby Yang reflects on her career as M+ museum shows her early films

Hong Kong-born documentary maker whose film about tainted-blood Aids crisis in China won Academy Award explains how she ended up in teaching

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Ruby Yang at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she is the director. Photo: Ruby Yang

Stephen McCarty

Published: 7:15am, 25 Jun 2024Updated: 10:43am, 26 Jun 2024

For Ruby Yang, it’s a case of “sweet 16 forever”.

On speaking to Post Magazine, the Hong Kong-born documentary maker had just attended the recent, inaugural Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival at M+, the city’s museum of contemporary visual culture, in the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Several of Yang’s films were shown as part of the festival programme, all in their original 16mm format. But her connection with the museum goes beyond the festival and is more substantial, as is that of her husband and filmmaking partner, Lambert Yam.

“M+ has acquired prints of ours, two of Lambert’s works and three of mine,” says Yang. “They also paid for their restoration in digital format and have licensed the films to show in perpetuity. We donated the 16mm prints to them and they have become part of the M+ permanent collection.”

Yang and Lambert Yam on screen at the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, which ran from May 30 to June 2, 2024 at Hong Kong’s M+ museum. Photo: Ruby Yang

The five works in question, all short films, and described by M+ as “impressionistic”, “experimental” or “stylised”, were made in the 1970s and 80s, with the pair collaborating to varying degrees, usually with Yang as director, Yam as cinematographer.