Poster Design by Christina Yijia Ren
Multi-channel Spatial Cinema Installation
Director: Sarasa Kikuchi
Starring: Junko Cheng, Kazue Peck, Maya Feldman
13 Hours Ahead is a 90-minute six-channel spatial cinema exploring the distance between an immigrant mother in the U.S. and her mother in Japan. Through quiet observational imagery and immersive sound, and specially fragmented design, the work transforms ordinary domestic rituals into sites of duty, sacrifice, and longing. The viewer is positioned inside the disjointed rhythms of two lives that unfold together yet never align. It’s an intimate meditation on maternal bonds, immigrant guilt, and the paradox of loving across borders.
At its core, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to care for someone you cannot reach. The project reframes migration not as a solitary journey but as a transgenerational condition. It foregrounds the often-erased perspective of those left behind - parents who wait in silence, growing old, who sustain bonds through phone calls and gestures, yet cannot erase the distance. It also speaks to the adult children navigating impossible choices between sacrificing ambitions to return home or enduring the guilt of absence.
"Thirteen hours separate a mother in Japan from her daughter in the US. In Kikuchi’s immersive six-channel installation, that gap becomes something one can feel in their body: two lives unfolding in parallel, connected, yet never quite touching. Through quiet domestic scenes, layered soundscapes, and a fractured screen arrangement, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to love someone you can only reach across time zones. It holds space not only for the immigrant who left, but for the parent left behind — a perspective rarely given its full weight." Emerson Contemporary
What Distance Holds - Media Art Gallery, Boston (2026)
