Magic Fingers 妙手回春

Chun Wang and Vivi Zhu

2024 / 14 minutes
United States
Chinese, English, Korean, Spanish with English Subtitles

Magic Fingers 妙手回春 is an ethnographic film created in collaboration with Sister Jing between September 2023 and May 2024. After moving to Philadelphia in the early 2000s, Sister Jing has operated Artiva Hair Salon in the city’s Chinatown for over a decade. At once a community hub and a site of personal refuge, her salon becomes a stage where questions of belonging, anti-Asian racism, and gentrification unfold. Employing an observational cinema approach, the film proposes relational practice. Through shared acts of cutting hair, mixing dyes, and painting, the film reveals the entanglements between researcher and subject. Shaky hand-held footage, glances into the camera, and incomplete dialogue register as both political and intimate gestures.
Methodologically, the film challenges conventional notions of objectivity in anthropology. Rather than concealing intervention, the collaborators—Sister Jing, Vivi, and Chun—choose to foreground it, showing how ethnographic knowledge emerges through embodied practice, long-term trust, and a refusal to disclose everything.
Premiered within the community during the 27th Street Movies! Festival in Philadelphia’s Chinatown (July 2024), the film catalyzed collective conversations around #NoArenaChinatown.