Flow is an experimental documentary, which uses the life-stories of a Chinese woman artist, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, came to study, had abortions and divorce in the U.S. and chose to live a precarious life of exile after the June 4 Crackdown; as points of departure to explore the possibilities of reconstructing other sociopolitical histories, from the perspective of someone who felt consistently excluded and displaced by the dominant versions. It also seeks to represent the hybridity and fluidity of identities, through cross-genre strategies. It attempts to tell some stories that have rarely been told before, while at the same time, stresses the instability and fictionality of these narratives.
In the tape, the narratives of the Cultural Revolution are constructed from an extremely private, personal, humorous, at times satirical, undoubtedly partial point of view, as close to the ways this woman experienced it as possible, given her psychic and material conditions. The fragments of memory are there to undermine the master narrative called history.