Hengyou Jen is a New York-based director who grew up in Taipei. As a kid, he, his brother and his best friend watched Ryan Higa on YouTube and spent weekends shooting skits on an iPad, adding lightsaber effects in post. By middle school he had his first camera and was making a feature-length horror film every year for his school’s Halloween event, still without really watching films. That changed when his mother showed him The Grand Budapest Hotel. “I think that’s when I found out there’s no right way to make a film,” he says. Jen went on to study Film and Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and in 2025 co-founded the production studio Cornershelf with Michelle Luo. His work since spans Tailbone, an original Japanese-language short starring Leo Imamura of the Tokyo band ALI; New York Archive: A Daniel Arnold Interview, a documentary portrait of the street photographer; and commercial films for the AI assistant Poke, the fashion label Zhexuan Hu, and a McDonald’s ad with the creator Fred Liu.
For Jen, a project usually begins with a place. Then he makes room for the people inside it. From commercial to music video to documentary, the method stays the same. Jen finds a space with a strong character and builds a visual world inside it. Then he leaves room for the people to find their place within.
People Places
Jen’s sense of place began with leaving one. He grew up in Taiwan and moved to New York. Today he directs projects around the world. “I always think having a different lens offers a special dimension to the work,” he says. “This was the first time I’d experienced this shift, and where my unique lens was actually celebrated. I think I approach my projects with a similar attitude.”
Another habit started on a high school set. During a dialogue scene, a classmate looked straight into the camera, and Jen’s crew told him it was a false take. “A question popped into my head and stuck with me for a while: why do people look into the camera?” he says. Working that out taught him how framing guides a story, and “looking-down-the-barrel” has since become a signature. “What I’ve grown fond of using is when my characters look straight into the camera, as if, for a moment, they could feel the attention of all the audience from the future,” he says. “I think we all share the same memory. That’s why the same films can touch people in different ways.”
An Afternoon in New York
With New York Archive: A Daniel Arnold Interview, Jen turned an afternoon of conversation with New York street photographer Daniel Arnold into a time capsule for himself to revisit.
“The Daniel Arnold documentary is one of the most influential experiences I’ve had,” Jen says. “Even now I look back on that afternoon: an afternoon with someone who has seen all that I’ve seen, and all that I’ve yet to see.”
Arnold’s work appears regularly in The New York Times, Vogue, and Interview. Jen had been living in New York for about two years and was already a fan when he started cold-emailing the photographer. He kept at it for two months, until Arnold finally agreed to sit down with him one afternoon. Jen put a crew together within two days and went to Arnold’s apartment in Chinatown. They spent half the shoot there and the other half walking the neighbourhood, where Jen watched Arnold work up close.
“An older Chinese man was riding his bike down the sidewalk towards us,” Jen recalls. “As he passed, Daniel held out his Leica M7 and flashed it in his face. We swiftly walked away, and Daniel said, ‘That’s how it’s done.’ It was quite inspiring.”
In the film, Arnold looks back on 20 years of photographing New York, walking through his creative process and how he spends his days. Jen directed the interview and cut six hours of interview footage down to the finished film. The documentary was featured on Director’s Library and was screened at Temporal Space on May 5, 2024.
More than three years after the shoot, Jen is still unpacking that afternoon. “Only recently have I understood some of the things he said back then,” he says. “I wonder how much his words have subconsciously affected me, and how much more of what he said I will come to understand.”
[EMBED: Director’s Library ]
Memories of Seoul
In 2025, Jen travelled to South Korea to make Poke × Kyoka, a short-form dance film commissioned by The Interaction Company of California for its AI assistant, Poke, and featuring the Japanese hip-hop dancer Kyoka Yamamoto.
Known simply as Kyoka, the Osaka-born dancer formed the crew Rushball with her childhood partner Maika, and in 2016 the pair became the first Japanese duo to win the hip-hop category at Juste Debout, the international street dance competition held in France. In 2025, her run on Mnet’s World of Street Woman Fighter made her a sensation in South Korea, where the film was shot.
The shoot ran on a skeleton crew. Jen handled the direction, camera, and post-production himself. True to form, Jen built the film around a space. Rather than a studio or a stage, he shot it in an old Korean grandmother’s house in Seoul, a setting so unexpected for a world-champion dancer that, Jen says, Kyoka was shocked when she arrived on set. “I was visiting Korea for basically the first time,” he says, “so I wanted to find a space you can only experience in Korea.”
Since the Kyoka campaign, Poke has grown fast: users sent more than 100 million messages in three months, and in June it became the first AI agent approved for Apple’s Messages for Business platform. In July 2026, the AI coding company Cognition acquired The Interaction Company in a deal valuing it in the low nine figures. Cornershelf has also since made more films for Poke, including one with the influencer Fred Liu.
[EMBED: Poke × Kyoka – Instagram ]
Tokyo Soundscapes
Jen’s unique lens is very evident in Tailbone, an original Japanese-language short that Jen wrote, directed and edited. Working with cinematographer Wen, the film captures nighttime Tokyo with an easy, natural texture, given the limitations that came with the project. “I actually wanted to shoot this film because Ethan and I wanted to shoot in Tokyo,” Jen says. “When a city is just so beautiful, you don’t really need to think too much about where you point the camera.”
The story follows Koji, a musician grappling with past glory and fading relevance, and its preoccupation with creative immortality has personal roots. “My inspiration is my mother,” Jen says. “Until I was about five years old, she was a TV show host. She then gave up the job and the fame so that my brother and I could see her at home and not on screen. I started giving more thought to her decision as I grew older and wanted to pursue film.”
While writing the script, Jen was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, and he fell in love with its idea of immortality. “The things we create are kind of like portals to our memories,” he says. “I see Koji in my mother and myself. I feel like we are all taking the same train, just at different stops.”
Koji is played by Leo Imamura, frontman of the Tokyo band ALI. Founded in Shibuya in 2016 as a multinational hip-hop and funk collective, ALI broke through internationally with ‘LOST IN PARADISE feat. AKLO’, the ending theme for the anime Jujutsu Kaisen. Shohei Ohtani later used it as his walk-up song with the Los Angeles Angels. The band’s songs have since opened Golden Kamuy, The Fable, and Dr. STONE, and ALI has toured the Americas and Asia. The film was also produced with support from Mr+Positive, the Tokyo production company whose clients include Nike, Gucci, SK-II, and Japan Airlines.
Because of this all-star lineup, the production was able to come together on a timeline that looked impossible on paper. “We had started preproduction of this film only five days before the shoot,” Jen says, and with days to go, there was no lead actor, no gear and no locations. Through his producer’s impeccable manoeuvring, the team found Imamura two nights before cameras rolled. The casting happened in a space of its own, a bar beneath a Tokyo tunnel where his producer worked. “We met up at Red Bar under Aoyama Tunnel, where I explained the concept to Leo,” Jen recalls. “He proceeded to share a personal story that parallels my character Koji. After that, there wasn’t much direction I had to give, honestly. It felt like I was shooting a documentary.”
The 15-minute film will screen at Frame Taipei on November 29.
Making room
The way Jen interprets space is through Cornershelf, the production studio he co-founded with Michelle Luo, which works across narrative cinema, commercial productions, and fashion films. The crew has worked together since NYU, and the company was formalised in July 2025. Jen is Creative Director. Luo, who came to film from social media marketing, is Managing Partner and runs everything off camera: the contracts, the budgets, the schedules and the clients. They run it out of an apartment warehouse in Brooklyn, where the bedrooms double as edit and sound suites and the living room hosts screenings, band rehearsals and dinner pop-ups. The idea is that the director’s vision survives from the first conversation to the final cut, and that the studio becomes a place where up and coming artists can make their work visible.
That structure lets Jen move between commissioned films and his own. “When I approach a commercial film, my focus is on the client,” he says. “Sure, I can offer my perspective, but I’m curious what vision they see that I’m not seeing. Even if their ideas initially disagree with mine, I want to try to understand. It’s a frustrating yet rewarding process. But it comes with a toll. I’m also human, and I have my own stories to tell. That’s where my personal films help.”
How the studio holds both is still taking shape. “This is something I’ve thought about recently,” Jen says. “I’m still figuring that out.” For now, the answer is the people. “What Cornershelf really gave me are collaborators and friends that I can go down this road with.”
Whether it’s a Tokyo street, a grandmother’s house in Seoul or an apartment in Brooklyn, Jen will find a story within it.
Hengyou Jen’s work can be seen on @corn3rshelf.
[Photo by Alex Zhao @owdubwo]
