In portraying the history of women’s struggle for self representation, Hiiona Choi is both a researcher and an artist. Utilizing footage from ‘Women of the Night’ (1948) and ‘Girls of the night’ (1961) this work offers an examination of two films that center upon Kinuyo Tanaka’s (1909-1977) transition from actress to director.
Edited in manners that render their plot and character’s illegible, PUKING TO THE NIGHT positions an encounters with abstraction and extrication. With a method that is less deconstructive than disembowling. Under her scalpel these films have been crumpled into a work of interuption, trauma, loss and degradation.
Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the first Japanese women to direct a feature length film. Beginning her career as an actress in the 1920s, Tanaka played in nearly 200 film and television productions before her move to direction. That ‘girls of the night’ operates as critique to Kenji Mizoguchi ‘Women of the night’ is evident. While in the first female characters entangle and entrap each other in games of treachery and gang domination. In the second, it is the normative order whose violence is interrogated and exposed.
The autonomy to depict female experience without sentimentality or patriarchial intervention is one spectatorial irony central to this project. With domination and sexualized violence playing a central motif, the scenario opens an intimacy for trauma. With an alien familiarity, perhaps PUKING TO THE NIGHT is not simply an articulation of female abjection but a means to center a viewer to their own bondage ; of detatchment, of desire and of erotic disavowal. Liminal.

– Riley Centaur