Morning Good (A Sense of Everyday Order I)

Mica Huang, 2026, Single-channel video (experimental video), 6 min 55 sec

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Sound: Sound

Color: Color

Language: Mandarin Chinese (Chinese & English subtitles)

This experimental short film was shot three years ago. The raw footage filled nearly half of a hard drive. I filmed continuously over many days, and when these different mornings were edited together, they appeared as a single ordinary morning. Generally, no one could tell that the footage was actually compiled from multiple mornings. I have always been drawn to this repeated sequence. The film contains no clear narrative structure, nor fixed dialogue or textual guidance; the act of filming itself was largely spontaneous. The only phrase repeated throughout the work is the simple greeting, “morning good.” Between these repetitions, I interspersed incidental moments and fragments of speech recorded during the shoot.

Filming in public spaces inevitably involves being questioned, cautioned, or even asked to leave—an experience familiar to any image-maker. I did not include these voices to explain or justify anything; they function more as part of the social machinery: rules, routines, and endlessly repeated scenes. This is what I refer to as a “sense of everyday order.” Both inside and outside the frame, there is a logic that is coherent yet faintly unsettling.

I first noticed this scene during my middle school years. At the beginning of each semester, for the first week or month, teachers would stand at the school gate and routinely greet every student with a “good morning.” Even then, I found the scene strangely compelling. I could not articulate exactly why, but the repetition of daily routines—the same clothing, perhaps even the same breakfast—made it difficult to distinguish one day from the next, or to know whether today’s events had already happened or would happen again tomorrow. This disorientation of time was fascinating to me, which led me, during a brief return to my home country, to film this scene that had recurred countless times throughout my adolescence.

While re-editing the film this year, I recalled my undergraduate graduation project, a much longer documentary. I do not know why, but I have always been drawn to filming things that appear boring, repetitive, and uneventful, painstakingly assembling large amounts of “tedious” footage into works that are difficult to watch. Even now, this tendency persists. The initial cut of that documentary approached one hour in length. My tutor jokingly remarked that no one would sit in an exhibition space without a comfortable cushion to watch such a tedious film for an hour—unless a bed were placed in the gallery, in which case people might come simply to sleep while watching. (I still like my tutor very much; she is a highly professional teacher and an excellent designer. I remember this comment vividly because I found it witty. I am not bothered by critiques or irony aimed at my work; they offer unique perspectives.) She also suggested that, instead of making documentaries, I try experimental video. Under her gentle “pressure,” that work was eventually compressed to twelve minutes. This memory resurfaced during the current editing process, prompting me to adopt subtraction rather than addition in structuring this piece. Dividing the work into three parts felt more honest than creating one overly long, content-heavy film. I often joke that it is like a poorly made production that, thanks to some form of capital, ended up with three seasons, all released during the peak of the Spring Festival.

The Chinese title of the work is 早上好, while the English title is deliberately rendered as Morning Good instead of the grammatically conventional Good Morning. This preserves the word order of the Chinese phrase, a deliberate deviation, and a small playful gesture. I enjoy wordplay in my work, like a form of deadpan humor. As a voice fragment in the film says: “Because of cultural differences…” Cultural differences affect not only how the footage is perceived but also how language is understood, misread, and reconfigured. In this sense, the interpretation of the work itself remains an open question, continuously reframed within different contexts.