“Pandas Are Pandas” is an experimental video essay that traces the strange afterlife of the Giant Panda as both national mascot and diasporic memory. The work begins with the 2023 recall of pandas from U.S. zoos to China, a seemingly administrative event that, for the filmmaker, resonates with the experience of being a Parachute Kid—an unaccompanied minor sent abroad for education, only to face eventual uprooting. The Giant Panda is not merely an object of affection or cultural pride. It is a symbol freighted with contradictions: fiercely protected, globally exported, politically neutral, and ideologically saturated. Both the panda and the Parachute Kid occupy spaces of cultural projection, suspended between nations, never fully belonging to one. In questioning what makes the panda ‘Chinese,’ the filmmaker considers how meaning is formed through repeated crossings between native and foreign lands. Yet these crossings are shaped by capital, containment, and control systems, a constructed space of simulated belonging.

“Pandas Are Pandas” reflects on the absurdity and melancholy of these conditions. The possibility of return is always there, yet deferred; to stay is both a privilege and a quiet act of estrangement. Weaving together archival footage, personal anecdote, and pop-culture ephemera, the work reflects how a creature once deployed to soften China’s global image has come to mediate the filmmaker's relationship to home, exile, and the ambiguities of identity. Framing the panda as subject and cipher, the filmmaker examines the residues of migration, nostalgia, and the dissonance between representation and reality. The work invites viewers to consider how national symbols outlive their intended meanings, and what they come to represent for those suspended between here and elsewhere.





Screening Selection:
LA Artcore 2025 Yuchi Ma Solo Show (supported by the Foundatio
Aesthetica Film Festival 2025- Artists’ Film 

Essay / Trailer 

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