Kao's work investigates the relationship between history and personal biography, between time, images, and media. He is a photographer and a collector of historical pictures as much as a filmmaker, animator, and media-archeologist. 'Taking a picture means an interruption of reality. Showing that picture means a cessation of fantasy,' states the artist. For him, the slideshow in particular sustains a tension between image, time, and stillness—and is situated beyond fantasy and reality, subsuming both photography's indexical relation to past events, and the expectancy of cinematic time and storytelling.