the black night has given me black eyes, yet l use them to search for lights

Director & Editor: Chang Liu (Leo) 

Choreographer & Dancer: Kimberly Orozco  

Light Design & After Effect: Chang Liu (Leo) 

Lighting Assistant: Shujing Zeng 

Camera Operator: Shujing Zeng & Chang Liu (Leo) 

Music: Singanushiga by Erzhan Mahefushen & Ashar Mehme 

Shooting Location: Salt Lake City, US 

Produced in 2019 

Premiered at Film and Media Arts Building, Salt Lake City, US  

Concept: 

The Black Night Has Given Me Black Eyes, Yet I Use Them to Search for Light is a screendance meditation on resilience, perception, and the female body's unyielding instinct to survive. Drawing from the evocative line by Chinese poet Gu Cheng, this work explores how darkness—both literal and metaphorical—becomes not only a condition of existence, but a lens through which light is sought.  

Through manipulated light, shadow, and color using After Effects design, the screen becomes a psychological terrain where visibility and obscurity blur. The female body moves between threat and transcendence, responding to an invisible yet palpable force—a hidden hand, representing the structural violence and silent oppression that haunt women's lives. Rather than narrating, the dance embodies survival: abstract yet visceral, fragile yet defiant.  

This work is not a portrait of victimhood, but a search. It is about the act of seeing—how eyes conditioned by night still insist on looking for light. Through fragmented glows, obscured textures, and dissonant motion, the screen holds both trauma and resistance. Here, light is not purity, but process—a flicker in the dark, an invitation to move, again and again.