Magic Fingers 妙手回春

Chun Wang and Vivi Zhu

2025 / 14 minutes
USA
Chinese with English Subtitles

Magic Fingers 妙手回春 is an ethnographic film in which I worked with Sister Jing from September 2023 to May 2024. After moving to Philadelphia in the early 2000s, Sister Jing has run Artiva Hair Salon in Philadelphia’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 play out. The film uses an observational cinema approach to propose relational practice. By learning to cut hair, mix dyes, and paint alongside Sister Jing, I often struggled with the entanglements of researcher and subject. In the film, the photographer's moments of shaky hand-held footage, glances into the camera, and incomplete dialogue are both political and intimate.

Methodologically, the film challenges assumptions of objectivity in anthropology. Instead of concealing intervention, the three of us, Sister Jing, Vivi, and Chun choose to foreground it. The film shows how ethnographic knowledge emerges through embodied practice, long-term trust, and refusal to disclose everything. First premiered in the community during the 27th Street Movies! Festival in Philadelphia’s Chinatown (July 2024), the film mobilized community conversations around #NoArenaChinatown.