Ho Rui An

Student Bodies

Embracing the conflicting negative and positive affect of the horror genre, Ho Rui An’s film Student Bodies is a self-described work of “pedagogical horror,” that organizes social, political, and economic events in Asia around the motif of the student body. Bound together by a suspenseful, eerie soundtrack, the film temporally cycles through its separate, though thematically interrelated, phenomena and events centering Asian students. Using the student body motif as a human signifier of varied connotations, the film follows phenomenon ranging from the Ch?sh? Five (the first five Japanese students who left to study in Britain during the late imperial period known as the Tokugawa Shogunate) to the 1976 Thammasat University massacre in Bangkok, Thailand, during which upwards of 100 student protestors in Thailand were murdered by state forces.

Employing horror genre tropes to produce a speculative, historical assemblage about Asia, Student Bodies generates a newly affective take on the trend of historical genealogies in contemporary art. Centering a relatable motif, the film drags the viewer into developing a personal stake in its eerie constellation, displacing the empathetic, patronizing attitude towards Asia, characteristic of neo-Orientalist sentiment. Ho’s use of horror genre strategies to describe Asia ironically invokes Western discourses of the “Yellow Peril”, a racist color-metaphor that is integral to the xenophobic aspect of colonialism. The film disputes conventional narratives of Asian modernization and radicalism, revealing the human strands intertwined within the greater socio-political webs of Asian nation-states. The horror genre thus becomes an uneasy affective tie, that forces the viewer into generating emotionally disconcerting affinities between the film’s disparate historical moments. The “horror” of pedagogy is exposed, dissolving totalizing narratives in its wake, even as the film reveals the precarity of its liminal, imaginative connective threads.