Samson Young, "Machines for Making Nothing #1: Triumph of the Spectacle," 2011

“Writing off the Wall”

Nadim Abbas, Bai Xiaoci, Lee Kit, Kitty Ko Sin Tung,
MAP Office, João Vasco Paiva, Adrian Wong, Samson Young

Curated by Venus Lau and Robin Peckham
Organized by Kunsthalle Kowloon (S.E.C.P.)

Opening 26 May 2011, 14:00 – 20:00
Forum 29 May 2011, 10:45 – 16:00

In and around the Hong Kong Art Fair
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
North Wanchai, Hong Kong

Kunsthalle Kowloon is pleased to announce “Writing off the Wall,” an exhibition of recent art concerned with textual intervention to be staged during the period of the Hong Kong Art Fair in public and privates spaces throughout the neighborhood of North Wanchai. The project will open to the public on the afternoon of 26 May and will continue indefinitely until participating works are confiscated, stolen, or destroyed.

The last week of May has quickly become the marked period of the Hong Kong art world calendar: despite previous attempts at organizing a territory-wide art festival across different registers of spaces and galleries, it is ultimately ArtHK that has come to occupy the defining role in determining what the world thinks of cultural production in the city. With this in mind–and of course recognizing that anyone serious about maintaining a curatorial relationship to Hong Kong must do something in this key moment–we began to think of what our program might contribute to this synthetic and ephemeral week-long ecology of vision and pleasure. Seeking to produce the fact of intervention through the most minimal and non-hostile means possible, we consider the possibility of effecting an incident of media engineering that might be legible only within the discursive sphere. We hold no ill will against the commercial activities of the art fair but nonetheless believe that something should occur to insert or at least imply new meanings within this fast-codifying structure of exhibition and presentation. And so we come upon the notion of text: a flexible medium without any necessary presence prior to typography and not necessarily limited by the strictures of language, we are curious about the possibilities of this approach to intervention–a stealth proposition.

Considering the relatively unique audiences that appear during the period of the art fair, consisting not only of international visitors but also a certain category of Hong Kong residents who appear primarily at the fair, we began to examine the various publics and audiences that exist at different spaces and in different situations at various other times of the year. It appears that few in the Hong Kong art world are interested in questions of audience direction, as most purportedly community-based projects tend to define their programs by the coincidence of unconscionably bad art and hostility toward the contemporary art world. “Writing off the Wall” seeks to reconfigure the structural possibilities of relationships with our varied audiences by accounting for the violence of public positioning: rather than demarcating a particular space for the exhibition, artists have been invited to install their projects as they wish throughout the area of the art fair–indoors and out–in hopes that our highly specific public of fairgoers may stumble across or even be forcibly subjected to the work included. We attempts to produce a minor contradiction by making the exhibition as formally accessible as possible by placing much of it in public space, while on the other hand the content and conceptual import of the work may appear vague or absent for unsuspecting passersby not tuned to our chosen channels of communication (of which this mailing is one). The exhibition will be available–for a short time at least–but not obvious, a parody of the certain strand of community art that assumes it public to be “the street” writ large.

Confronting the mass of scholarship and critical reflection on the relationship between art and language produced particularly since the 1960s with the rise of conceptual art and its attraction to text, we find ourselves overwhelmed, enthused, and mildly disappointed in the lack of interest in the relationship between text as a medium that can only be instantiated with the assistance of some other material and language as a category simultaneously more encompassing but less relevant. This project seeks to again look closely at what materiality–and, of course, specific materials–have to do with art practice now, at a time and in a place where studio practice seems to be a sidelined genre in comparison with deterritorialized aspects of fabrication, participation, and intervention. Projects invited for inclusion in “Writing off the Wall” tend to deal with text as a tool, and language as a reservoir of potentiality sublimated by this more utilitarian device; material is typically a support, but also something that melds with and enters into a mutually dependent relationship with its textual superstructure.

We conceive of the exhibition as a platform for chain reactions that might themselves go on to catalyze new and interesting forms of visual or textual discourse. Rather than approaching a theme and commissioning or inviting projects related to our work, the curatorial process for this particular platform involved simply presenting the possibility of minimal intervention in the art fair environment, possibly using text, to a group of artists with demonstrated interests in such practices. Even this statement was written only after collecting proposals from these artists, making the project not so much a curator-driven exhibition as a piece of flexible material for the support of media-driven messages and sly hints at possibilities. “Writing off the Wall,” as a radically collaborative response to the filtered and economical mission of the art fair proper, exists during this time as a possibility of another way of looking. We hope our audiences will learn to read the terrain they tread as if it were a map, seeking out the moments of content within the broader form that we adapt to our own purposes. By making an entire neighborhood the space of an exhibition we seek to call attention to the role of the legend, the key to deciphering our graphic world, without which everything appears to be something.

Artists contributing projects to this textual platform, oriented around this document, include Nadim Abbas, Bai Xiaoci, Lee Kit, Kitty Ko Sin Tung, MAP Office, João Vasco Paiva, Adrian Wong, Samson Young; their work ranges from posters and namecards to monumental sculptural moments and electronic devices. A map will be made available of installed work at www.kunsthallekowloon.org and, in printed form, from the Hong Kong Gallery Guide booth art ArtHK.

In addition to these installations in the environs of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a selection of critics and curators have been invited to deliver a program of site-specific talks on notions of public, audience, and community in the art fair context. Updated details of this schedule will likewise be available at www.kunsthallekowloon.org.

Distributed forum, 29 May 2011 (Sunday)

10:45: John Batten (Critic and co-convenor, Central and Western District Concern Group), “After Sunday Yumcha: Thirty-three ‘must-knows’ about leisure, money, art, and space in Hong Kong” (Open space between Immigration and Revenue Towers, at Norman Ko sculpture)

14:30: Pauline J. Yao (Co-director, Osage Art and Ideas), “Audience and Client: Curating for the profit sector” (ArtHK, Osage Gallery Booth)

16:00: Jeff Leung (Project Manager, Hong Kong Arts Centre), “Art Out of the White Cube: Public art in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Arts Centre, lobby)

MAP Office, 'Lean Planning Thin Pattern'

This is an experiment in exhibition-making. It begins with the situation of cultural production and circulation throughout the Pearl River Delta, a conurbation that forms a cyclical distribution structure through which goods travel more freely than people. Encompassing a near continuous metropolis that stretches from Hong Kong and Shenzhen in the southeast through Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai and ultimately Macau in the southwest, the region is marked by fascinating paths of growth (a form of just-in-time urbanism that Hou Hanru has called ‘post-planning’ and MAP Office has termed a ‘thin pattern’), unbelievable demographics (a population of some 120 million and an average age below 30 in certain cities), and an uncertain position in global exchange: although it was once known as the face of the Chinese economic miracle for its transition from farmland to manufacturing hub in the space of a decade, many factories have since decamped to interior regions with cheaper labor, and the Yangtze River Delta centered on Shanghai is increasingly usurping its role in finance and shipping. Nevertheless, contemporary Cantonese art has consistently been most interested in the possibilities for personal freedom and alternative visual production that emerge under the urban conditions made possible by these economic structures rather than manufacturing and trade per se, a fact evident in the growing list of alternative spaces and collective moments in the recent art history of Guangzhou and Shenzhen (and, as the territory becomes increasingly dominated by mainland Chinese cultural thinking, Hong Kong as well).

Installation view with work from Leung Chi Wo (Photo courtesy of Jon Phillips)

The most interesting nexus within this system occurs at the point of friction between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a functionally-international border that operates as a point of exchange between China and non-China even as it regulates the definitions of these terms through a complex diagram of class, race, nationality, and power. Here, there is a privilege of passing that entails more than appearance: this is the right of passage, a rite in which many thousands indulge every day, but it is also a ritual of consolidation from which many millions are excluded on ambivalent terms. We find it productive to think of the border in this particular scenario as a mechanism, as something more than a gate that selectively allows visitors and other bodies in motion to pass from one side to the other; much more so, it also produces these very bodies and enacts a particular visual culture of passing. From the types of goods offered for sale at the entrances and exits to the border crossing to the luggage in which they are transported, from the types of clothing and hairstyles of those crossing to the uniforms and modes of transportation on either end, the figure of the border exists as a very special moment in the cultural imagination of south China, positioned somewhere between 1980s Hong Kong cinema, reform and opening, and grocery shopping.

Installation view with work from Hu Xiangqian (Photo courtesy of Jon Phillips)

This exhibition emerges as an experiment in adopting this structure as a culture of display. The central strategy is simple: to produce a cultural space that might take on such a border-mechanism function. Within this strategy of course, is embedded a set of tactics contributing to a field we might classify as the curatorial; our tactics include balance, representation, space, sound, re-use, displacement, and so on. The exhibition takes place within the archetypal conceptual architectures of the border, installed first in a set of disused shipping containers placed between the harbor and the hulking post-industrial buildings of the New Territories, an effective cultural border zone between the urban cores of Hong Kong and Shenzhen. It is then to be installed again in an empty factory complex on the edges of Shenzhen, and the process of moving these containers from one pole to the other–including the legal and financial labor involved in pushing art-and-idea from one side of the border to the other–will become a central component of the exhibition project. These two forms of architectural space, linked in the middle by the container truck, constitute the central shipping apparatus of the Pearl River Delta, summarizing through the use and re-use of space a process of movement and production spanning half a century from the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial hub to its rebirth as an export control point for the factories of Shenzhen–and again into a third stage as the latter complexes began to go bankrupt or move further inland. This is a history of failures, and one ripe for incorporation into the artistic trajectory that we might call an ontology of cross-border living.

Installation view with work from Nadim Abbas and Leung Chi Wo (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

Conceptualized during the global financial crisis of 2008, when the number of empty factories and discarded containers in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively, had reached an all-time high, the project has, rather ironically, been forced to shift focus and downsize due to an increased demand for the tools of global export trade in 2010. The exhibition thus moves into yet further marginal spaces in its attempt to materialize both sides of this complex machinery, positioned in a former refugee camp (now golf course, naturally) in the middle of the eastern New Territories. Occupying five containers in a row of 10 on the edge of a storage yard–small by any standard–of several dozen, the site is dusty, windy, and cold. When evening sets in and the only light comes from the handful of barebulbs hung within the containers the effect becomes something along the lines of a night market, or, more appropriately for our purposes, a grey market. This is one of the major logics to inform our curatorial practice with regard to this exhibition: rather than working with artists to produce polished and resolved work that attempts to explore the border at a critical distance, we asked our collaborators to physically cross the border, often carrying materials, in order to complete their projects, essentially making for a grey market of ideas not quite ready for appearance at the real markets. It is also an instantiation of shanzhai culture, a phenomenon that has received much attention from the press in recent years. Stemming from the word for distributed domestic factory units that have emerged at various junctions of tension throughout early modern and recent Chinese history, this is a fascinating culture of reverse engineering, copying, reinvention, improvement, and innovation that has produced many of the partially non-functional technologies widely available in the regional electronics industries, the epicenter of which is located at Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen. The works described here are thus not-quite-ready, not-quite-unique, and not-quite-real; the same goes for the exhibition as a whole.

Matt Hope and Jon Phillips, 'Laoban Container Sounsystem,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of the artists)

The first container belongs to Matt Hope and Jon Phillips, inventors of the Laoban Soundsystem based in Beijing and Guangzhou, respectively, who have here produced the “Laoban Container Soundsystem” (2011). Fabricated under close observation at two factories outside Guangzhou, the work consists of a massive steel front plate cut and welded to custom dimensions in Huizhou and 40 speaker drivers made by hand to custom dimensions in Panyu. The steel plate is set flush several inches inside the mouth of the container and the speaker drivers are then wired into the empty holes left on its face, ultimately transforming the empty volume of the container into an infinite baffle prepared to take advantage of some 4000 watts of amplification. Hope and Phillips see their work as the tracing of a line between production and consumption, first taking advantage of the highly customized production situation in South China and then attempting to draw consumers–here, those moved by the sound produced by DJs at the helm of the system–into direct contact with the factories. The resulting piece fits in aesthetically with a peculiar erotics of the post-global manufacturing situation while on another level remaining a fantastically pragmatic piece of equipment for mobile event situations. Each and every element of the fabrication process becomes a telling signifier of this paradoxical situation: in this case the steel plate was made just millimeters too large, requiring the artists and curators to file, finagle, and otherwise negotiate the standardized geometry of ISO parts in order to complete the work. Interestingly, this error occurs as digital models–drawn on Hope’s computer according to the indicated ISO dimensions–clash with the reality of production when it at last becomes material with the collusion of steel and fire at the hands of underpaid technicians. Here, the engineering of sound can only be a political act: fabrication there, assembly here.

Leung Chi Wo, 'Fish Farm House,' 2006-2007, (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Hong Kong artist Warren Leung Chi Wo deals with this notion of the same object enacting different functions on opposite sides of the border in a less oblique way albeit with the distance of the documentarian, contributing the series of photographs entitled “Fish Farm Houses” (2006-2007). Executed in collaboration with anthropologist Sidney Cheung, these 60 images depict the transitional structures erected over the past half century in the northern New Territories in order to house owners and workers at aquaculture complexes; now that this industry is no longer economically viable, the buildings are used only as temporary resting places or housing for guest workers from the mainland. Often positioned in or adjacent to the closed border zone against the Shenzhen River, they are dwarfed by the rigidly designed skyscrapers and residential complexes built on the mainland side of the border. In this scenario the same architectural feature is able to reflect macroscopic shifts in economic flows, indicating the Hong Kong occupation of the fish farm territory during a period of economic and cultural growth in the city (namely, the 1960s and 1970s, when a mushrooming population of immigrants stressed the resources of the region) and then the later reoccupation by mainland immigrants themselves as the farms declined in productivity. Once known as fishing settlements, Hong Kong and Shenzhen alike are now far and way net importers of seafood; aside from demands of quantity, the waters here are now too polluted for a significant catch. In this exhibition these photographs are split into two groups: half of the images, those depicting interiors of the wood and metal structures, are placed inside the containers, presenting intimate views of kitchens, living rooms, and sleeping areas with their own liminal aesthetics of occasional habitation, while the other half, those depicting the structures from without, are instead printed as banners and hung over the entrances to the container volumes in an attempt to activate these standardized spatial units as objects. As the sun sets to the rear, the sky depicted in these external shots appears to change also from blue to grey.

Hu Xiangqian, 'Flying Blue Flag,' 2005, (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Hu Xiangqian, too, plays with the ideas of settlement as a counterpoint to migration, here through a video recording a hypothetical intervention into Chinese local political machinery entitled “Flying Blue Flag” (2005). Democracy is actually alive and well (or at least surviving) at the lowest tiers of municipal government in rural China; in an attempt to define its possibilities through a humorous aesthetics of breakdown, the artist tried to run for village head in an election for which he was ineligible, making a mockery of the democratic process and using every tactics available in order to win votes: in the less egregious cases he plays on racial prejudice and shows small business owners ridiculous renderings of his plans to redevelop commercial zones, while at the other end of the spectrum he offers outright cash bribes. All of this is executed in a style clearly derived in large part from American political drama and Hong Kong triad films, complete with waving flags, victory signs, ill-fitting suits, awkward handshakes, and copious backslapping–reminiscent, perhaps, of the early days of government in Shenzhen. Taking place in the small town of Nanting outside of Guangzhou (where he was based until a recent move to Beijing), this dramatic video delivers an intriguing study in the flow of styles and ideas across borders: here it is largely this aesthetics of political process that commands attention, particularly in light of the fact that elected leadership in this part of the world is rarely ever less farcical than Hu Xiangqian makes it. It is a game of rhetoric, one filtered through the populist political imagery of Shenzhen that is itself a shadow of the Hong Kong legislative system. Installed here on an old security monitor and placed on a stool in the rear of a container otherwise occupied by the photography of Leung Chi Wo, we begin to approach an aesthetics of border crossing, albeit one defined by the passage of ideas at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

Li Jinghu, 'Untitled,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

The third container is given over to Li Jinghu, widely but perhaps apocryphally labelled the only contemporary artist in Dongguan–the Pearl River Delta factory town best known for producing plastic consumer products and building materials rather than electronics, a massive migrant population compared even to Shenzhen, a thriving sex culture, and a pseudo-syndicalist style of government by corporation. Given this background, Li Jinghu had originally wished to fill an entire container with water and salt to mimic synthetic human sweat, materializing labor in an ambiguous way that would leave its biopolitical products locked up and unavailable to the spectator. And while labor is always invisible, for this exhibition it also proved difficult to control: given a nonporous ground surface and a large number of electrical cables attached to a generator in the immediate vicinity, this proposal proved practically impossible. The artist later proposed an alternative version in which detergent fluid (coincidentally, the old-fashioned “Labor Band”) and water filled a barrel also housing an air compressor, thus filling the container with bubbles. Although it was never fully filled, this did prove to be an interesting approach to social sculpture, birthing bizarre pseudo-organic forms that grow, shrink, morph, and move, traveling around the space of the mouth of the container over the course of each day. Initially viewed through doors closed so as to leave only a thin sliver of space through which to peep, as these forms grow the doors can also be opened, allowing the soap structures to leak out the bottom of the doors and grow toward work in neighboring containers. I admire most in this work a fidelity to material despite the contextual failure of the original proposition: interested in the productive capacities of the region, Li Jinghu creates his work entirely out of the plastic and metal domestic objects and appliances so widely available–produced in Dongguan for consumption in Hong Kong and beyond.

Nadim Abbas, 'Cataract II,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of the artist)

Aside from further photographs from Leung Chi Wo, the fourth container is dominated by an installation produced by Nadim Abbas entitled “Cataract II” (2011). Although similar in concept to a recent solo exhibition in two crisp galleries in downtown Hong Kong, here the container setting brackets this work as if it were an altar of sorts: set several feet ahead of the innermost wall, a clean white wall appears as a freestanding monolith. At is center a pair of window frames of the flimsy aluminum style so common to Hong Kong apartments (intended to keep children in and thieves out) block a backlit photograph of Iguazu Falls, the South American tourist landmark infamous locally for its starring role in the 1997 Wong Kar-Wai film Happy Together. The falls, in that film a metonymical reference to the enthralling depths of a lover, are here further mechanically enhanced by a scrolling water pattern between photograph and light source, clumsily animating the water effect and gesturing toward the wall hangings and digital clocks also–surprise, surprise–produced in the Peal River Delta. Less interested in such politics of production, however, Abbas seeks a more universal grammar of psychoanalytical architectures of the self based on the experience of viewing; in this space, a loud amplifier sitting behind the window plays a waterfall recording that serves to further immerse the spectator within this image. Such immersion, however, can only come at a distance–the production values of the environment are low enough to force viewers into a vacillating relationship of absorption and boredom, drawing attention to the apparatus of the window frame and pushing into the background the literary or poetic references of the waterfall and water itself. Although it sits on a small peninsula just several dozen meters from Tolo Harbor, the immediate site of the containers is dusty and barren, leading the artist to insert this particularly restful moment into the harsh metal space of the exhibition galleries. This is a very conscious psychology of architecture, one that requires no context but interacts with site and place wherever it is located.

Huang He, 'Lilliput,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

Probably overlooked by many visitors, this container also contains the diminutive work of Guangzhou-based artist Huang He. Consisting of nothing but rock sugar and folded paper, this piece, entitled “Lilliput” (2011), is intended as an intervention into the fengshui and general spatial environment of the container setting. According to the standard ISO dimensions of the shipping container and the location and style of art works within it (paying particular attention to the aspect of water in Abbas’s work), the artist was able to diagram the proper actions to take without ever seeing the site or indeed ever entering Hong Kong. As a result, the photographs to the left of the space have a short line of rock sugar along their inner edge, while the white wall opposite the frontal opening of the container is preceded on its right side with another such line. Directly to the right as one enters the space there is a third line, here also including two sheets of standard computer paper folded tightly into square shapes, both of which are covered with a typed segment of text but only one of which reveals this writing on its exterior. The latter such text, authored by the artist’s sister Huang Shan, consists of a poem that touches upon the Shenzhen River, the idea of a homeland, regional accents, Hong Kong television, and consumer culture in these two Pearl River Delta cities. The other, three paragraphs of prose written by Huang He herself, approaches similar themes through a different tone, recounting anecdotes from a childhood spent on the banks of the Shenzhen River–all the while keeping in mind the fact that she was born in Guangzhou and counts as her ancestral home the town of Zhanjiang. We find here the derivation of the work title: Huang He’s mother, at least as recounted in this text, worked in “Lilliput,” or the land of the little people, a colloquial name given to the theme park Splendid China, which reproduces in miniature the great nationalist landmarks of Chinese history. As to whether these talismanic texts and pieces of sugar had their intended effect on the space, of this I cannot play the judge; nevertheless, it may be worth noting that this container was consistently warmer than any of the others.

Adrian Wong, 'Kucheza Na Sisi: Footketballe,' 2011 (Photo courtesy of Nadim Abbas)

The final container is occupied by Hong Kong artist Adrian Wong, who uses it for a performance engaging with the history of the site as a refugee camp during and after the war in Vietnam. Leading up to the exhibition opening, Wong hired two African immigrants seeking refugee status in Hong Kong and asked them to think of how they are stereotypically perceived within the racially rather monotonous society of Hong Kong; an acting coach then taught them how to act out these attributes in an exaggerated manner and assisted them in developing characters based on such a persona. Equipped with these new theatrical personalities, the actors then went on to invent a bizarre ball game inside the container involving a ball balanced between the eye and nose, brooms, heavy metal balls, chalk circles, and piles of dirt. As audience members arrived the men attempted to teach the rules of this game to their new students, all the while casting the questions of political identity, race, and belonging into high relief. Wong consistently employs this strategy of overacting as a tool in his performance-based work, and the results typically make for aspects of documentation that remain strong even after the factor of liveness disappears with the passing of time: in this case, a sound recording of raised voices, whistles, and balls clanking on steel walls, continues to animate the container space. As during the performance proper, this creates an atmosphere of participation that can only be described as forced or partially unpleasant, interpellating the viewer as a component of the work without ever asking for permission.

Installation view of exhibition site (Photo courtesy of Jon Phillips)

This is the beauty of an exhibition in containers on a patch of dirt by the sea: it could be anywhere but, for the moment at least, it is here.

It has become a truism: Chinese art is big not only in terms of physical scale, but also in the impressions it imparts to the observer. Chinese art, and not just that of the big, red, and shiny variety, tends toward the shocking and the monolithic, qualities established through a sense of illusion that accompanies the often extraordinary production values of fabrication and large-scale craft. Hong Kong art, on the other hand, is small—or so the story goes. Hong Kong critics write that local artists work on a small scale because of their environments: studios and galleries alike are diminutive, so the production of art is spatially constricted. Artists, on the other hand, prefer to believe that their work remains small because of a certain strategy of discursive resistance: having been left out of the mainland contemporary art boom, they now intentionally work in a rhetorical style that desists from the grandiose claims of the public sculpture fabricated in massive workshops just across the border to the north.

Both of these apparently logical statements, of course, contain only half-truths at best. Space itself rarely plays such a defining role in the production of culture; space, after all, is not place, which alludes more properly to the accumulated matrices of social interaction that populate the alternately physical and virtual worlds of spatial constitution. Although contemporary art in Hong Kong and mainland China would seem to have arrived at their current states relatively independently and through different routes, the shared history of development actually extends further back than advocates of colonial cosmopolitanism might care to admit. A porous border, at least for the intellectuals who found themselves so often labeled refugees over the course of the twentieth century, has assured that forms and ideas of modern culture have always found a way to keep the staggered trajectories of Chinese art more or less even across the region. Why, then, such a gulf when it comes to the contemporary? A comparative close reading of certain historical functions of studio practice will reveal that size and scale are not nearly the overdetermined properties of social space they may seem to be, and that notions of place and cultural placement play a much more significant role in the production of space in art.

Wu Hung has advanced a rather singular conception of monumentality that will be useful here. Having developed an art historical methodology for his classic account of the public and historic functions of art and artifact in ancient Chinese society, Wu later applied this same strategy to his exegesis of the planning of Tian’anmen Square, and it is this possibility of an art history of architecture, or an architectural reading of art history, that I am interested in here. The defining properties of monumentality in the classical scholarship, he relates, are almost self-evidently defined through empirical reference to the category of the monument: it is permanent, durable, hard, solemn, and still. We might add to this list that the classical monument bears an implication of the public and defines its own space in a sculptural sense despite its original integration with the architectural grid (indeed, it is this latter property that allows for the collapse of the sculpture-architecture category that proves so productive for Wu Hung in his analysis of contemporary planning). For Wu Hung, however, this set of attributes is competent only insofar as it refers to the intentional monument erected such that it might reflect the properties of monumentality. His work, however, is much more interested in the notion of unintentional monumentality, which occurs when an object—any object, it would seem—acquires the ability to memorialize or commemorate the past, and, most importantly, to bring structure to history. This definition, which I prefer to call weak monumentality in light of the fact that it subsumes a much more general set of objects bordering on the universal, almost unintentionally assigns to the project of Chinese art, from the classical to the contemporary, a project of remembering. Regardless of the historical validity of this application, it does indeed open a new set of readings for Chinese art that we, as external observers, might call monumental on the basis of size, form, location, context, and referent alone.

The best example here in terms of a brutally explicit relationship to the monument may be the installation “Uprooted Obelisk” (2008) presented by Liu Wei at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art on the occasion of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, and consists of a stone obelisk some eight meters tall seemingly balanced with its tip to the ground and suspended from the ceiling. As with the work of the classical monument, which almost always eschews subtlety in favour of accessibility, there are few questions left unanswered here. This is a monument, inverted. Though the conceptual act of approaching the monumental form in such a way within a work of art is highly symbolic, it also appears simplistic and petulant in many ways, depending on visual shock and perhaps a touch of fear (it was eventually exhibited laid out horizontally along the floor out of safety concerns) in order to produce a reaction ideally consisting first of awe that only later shifts to reflection. Armed with the deliberately emboldened definition of monumentality, however, we are invited to inquire into the relationship of this architectural feature to history: which history is memorialized here, and how is this history structured? The first half of this query opens up space for imagination simply because no information is offered. Liu Wei refers, in his own statement about the work, to the origins of the obelisk in ancient Egyptian aesthetics, willfully oblivious to the play of power enacted through the public sites in which such structures stand across the world. The artist thus creates an imagined and engineered history, however ambiguous, that hovers just beyond the available space of the work proper. This gestures toward how history is structured through the act of exhibition—it is quite literally inverted, narrated, and made virtual—but also at how the work seems to be produced precisely in order to provide a scale and a monumental form for a history that would not otherwise exist. The same relationship is evident, though slightly less explicit, in the artist’s “Energy Block” (2008), a room-sized installation of machinery, buttons, lights, and sounds intended to synthesize the anxious sensations of a vaguely menacing piece of anonymous if misunderstood technology.

Something similar happens in the work of Xu Zhen, whose inosaurs” (2007) appears particularly monumental in this context. This installation, positioned outside the exhibition galleries of Long March Space during the exhibition NONO, consists of two glass tanks several meters tall, each filled with one half of a bisected brontosaurus fabricated out of resin and preserved in a liquid like formaldehyde (it was intended to be placed in the gallery, but was ultimately outwitted by its own aspirations to size and glory). The allusion to history here is two-fold: superficially, the reference is to a history even further removed, or, more properly, a prehistory, but the work is conceptually directed at a much more recent historical narrative in the form of the auction-topping taxidermy tank works of Damien Hirst. As art market satire, however, this installation is stunningly hollow and even sterile; here, the joke is on the repetition of form itself. Xu Zhen appears to accentuate and ultimately laugh along with certain tendencies in contemporary Chinese art to exaggerate the most glaringly vacuous aspects of global culture: the big is made bigger, the absurd even more preposterous. The scale is certainly monumental, but its reorganization of history in this work is incidental, serving primarily to position itself within the recent developments of pseudo-conceptual contemporary art. In his project “88418-1.16″ (2005), Xu Zhen again fabricates an imagined history via the form of the monument. Through video, photography, and the installation of an artificial mountain top within a refrigerated glass vitrine, the artist constructs a narrative in which he ascends Mt. Everest and cuts off the top peak at a height roughly equivalent to his own. Historical truth is again doubled here, as the story itself offers a conceptual gesture of the subversion of the relationship between man and nature (not to mention the ambitions of the Chinese cultural elite), but, in another way, the obvious fallaciousness of the story also shifts its focus to the storytelling itself. As such, history is produced through the form of the monument—the piece of mountain that functions as a commemoration of the act of attaining it—as much as it is organized by it, and monumentality is allowed to fill in the gaps of history by virtue of the shock of scale.

The third archetypal approach to the ordering and fabrication of history in mainland Chinese installation art is found in the work of Zheng Guogu. Whereas both Liu Wei and Xu Zhen employ the literal strategies of monumentality in the form of public architecture and museum-style preservation, respectively, Zheng Guogu adopts a more oblique approach to the naturalization of history, though he too does touch upon the forms and fetishes of natural history. In “Hundred-Year-Old Tree Blooms Again” (2008) and several related installations, the artist uproots and transplants an age-old (and possibly legally protected) hardwood tree, shipping it by road across the country and replanting it in a new environment where its odds of survival are relatively slim—perhaps even worse than those of the upstart art district that surrounds it. Through a process of negotiation, purchasing, delivery, and publicity, the artist turns the tree into a spectacle of its own existence, suggesting, due not only to its age and stature but also to his own work, that this living organism is a monument in its own right. He goes a step further in sculptures produced collaboratively with the Yangjiang Group like “Waterfall” (2003) or Garden of Pine Also Fierce Than Tiger II [sic] (2010), pouring liquid wax over smaller trees and other objects in order to capture their likenesses and make eternal the momentary positions of such living things. Resembling Xu Zhen’s process of embalming in some ways, this conceptual technique insists that there is something worthwhile, something long-lasting in the visual appearances of these objects, much like the tree that gains currency as contemporary art only when Zheng Guogu metaphorically packages it and releases it into the world. That is to say, monumentality is not here a goal or even an intention so much as it is a constellation of techniques by which the artist achieves legitimacy for his own practice, allowing installations constructed at scale to demand a certain historical precedent that becomes the aesthetic value of the work far more than its visual appearance.

In the face of work like Liu Wei’s “Uprooted Obelisk,” the critical viewer might be tempted to write off such allusions to monumental forms as manifestations of the harmless ludic desire for humorous satire that marks contemporary art. I would venture, however, that these artists are quite serious when they demand that their works fabricate alternative histories—that this is more facetious than it is playful. Size and scale are almost always intended as mockeries of their own pitfalls, but this strategy rarely succeeds in desisting from its own seductions. No one, it should be said, actually believes that Xu Zhen’s “Dinosaurs” is a humble attempt to point out the absurdity of increasingly larger and ever more expensive pieces of art because it is itself an absurdly large and expensive installation. What makes this fact painfully clear is the extraordinarily high production value of such work, and it is production value that makes the pseudo-historical narratives offered by the monumentality of contemporary art believable or at least viable under the erasure of the exhibition. That is to say, illusion is itself a constituent component of the production process, which has recently come to depend on flawless sites of fabrication and manufacturing in the upper reaches of global contemporary art from Jeff Koons to Zhang Huan. Within contemporary culture, art no longer plays the role of the amateur gadfly, gesturing toward larger phenomena, but rather has come to imitate such phenomena with amazing fidelity. And even as practice expands from the studio into the factory (or, often, the fabrication studio), studio spaces grow to include storage for objects fabricated, work space for assistant labourers, and so on. It is not so much that Chinese art is big because its studios and urban spaces are relatively large, but rather that such spaces of production adjust their own scale to contain the bloated discourse of contemporary Chinese art. The reasons for its affair with size are too complicated to discuss here, but I suspect that the foremost factors are an impatient desire to be noticed globally and a genuine interest in entering into dialogue with the scale of China, particularly as a global factory.

We should look again, then, at the notions of scale and space in Hong Kong art. It would be easy to point to factors exactly opposite to those affecting Chinese art discussed above, claiming that underground culture seeks to avoid attention (an obvious falsehood) and that, with its manufacturing industries relocated to the mainland, there is no inherent interest in examining the issues of production and circulation. But absence does not constitute a reason for disinterest any more than the traditional complaints hold: that space in Hong Kong is too expensive, leading to relatively small studios, galleries, trucks, and elevators. The latter is true, of course, but large-scale fabrication may be even cheaper and easier in Hong Kong than in Beijing. With a high concentration of skilled factories and workshops, many owned by local businessmen and management chains, located within several hours by container truck, it would actually be exceedingly simple for local artists to manipulate and take advantage of these systems of production. There is a reason that artists, working in formerly industrial spaces on the outskirts of the city, instead turn towards craft and work at the scale of the human hand, and I suspect this reason relates more or less to the rejection of the trading lifestyle of commercial Hong Kong business in the Pearl River Delta. That is to say, the ideology of art in Hong Kong insists on its difference from secular life, retaining an almost premodern attachment to the aura of studio practice long abandoned in the post-globalization ideologies prevalent on the mainland and elsewhere—a phenomenon of difference that owes more to the recent social history of the development of Hong Kong industry in the mainland and the ensuing political battles with the central government than to any imagined divergence in art historical trajectories. In many ways, studio practice in Hong Kong entails the creation of a single private space of the purely personal, a space for expression rather than for conceptual engineering, in response to crowded residential conditions and an ever diminishing quantity and quality of per capita public space. Although there is a nascent movement towards both community art, which here typically emphasizes the involvement of non-art participants with art world activities not necessarily taking the form of art practice, and street art, which inserts works of art edging closer to popular culture in public spaces, this movement remains far and away secondary in significance to the private culture of the studio.

Lee Kit is probably the clearest representative of this trend, turning his entire practice into an event showcasing the alternative lifestyles of the artist and using exhibitions as a platform to proselytize or at least demonstrate the seductions of studio practice. He is a consummate painter outside painting, with no interest whatsoever in the historical explorations of painting as a medium of image and process, but he does mark his hours by painting layer upon layer of lines and stripes on thin pieces of cloth draped over a table in the middle of his studio. In his most recent series, “Stories” (2010), Lee Kit downloads photographs involving cloth found through targeted keyword searches on the Internet, studying the resulting images of families picnicking or of linen tablecloths over dining tables in order to synthesize a narrative for each of the figures pictured and its background environment. He then reproduces the patterns of these textile objects, often pictured crumpled or folded, on a flat piece of blank cloth, typically painting patterns of stripes, plaids, and solids before hanging the piece, as if it were a canvas, on the exhibition wall. Projects like this one would appear to be fundamentally anti-monumental, not in the satirical mode of the mainland artists discussed above but in actual form; there is very little space for anything less substantial than pure sincerity in such work. Similarly, although this work does construct narratives for the figures it touches upon, it does not have anything to say on an historical level, or, more appropriately, it does not make any claim to history. Monumental form is unnecessary here, not because its presence would be impossible but because the actions of artistic practice function on a different register. For Lee Kit, stories exist on a human scale. His earlier work brings this mode of production into the public sphere, as with “A perfect ending for a perfect day” (2008–09), in which he built a bed for himself on the floor of the gallery space out of mattresses, sheets, and pillows on which he had painted phrases like “Pour yourself a hot bath, pour yourself a drink.” The artist then proceeded to live in this environment for the duration of the exhibition, attempting to demonstrate the possibility of a private, personal space even in public through the work of his own body.

One can note in the work of Nadim Abbas a similar relationship to scale, albeit one that functions beyond the space of personal lifestyle. If Lee Kit’s nest-like environment, developed in “A perfect ending …” and elsewhere, is concerned with the generation of a social place for interaction and comparative aesthetics, Abbas is more interested in the essential properties of space as a dimension in which such events unfold. “Perspective Study” (2001), for example, consists of a wheelchair parked on a black-and-white checkered floor within a semi-cylindrical warped mirror, resulting in a range of diverse visual effects of perspective from different viewing positions inside the assemblage. Other installations of that period turn marks of degradation on old photographs into actual interventions in real space and replace mirrors with glass in order to test the ability of the eye to distinguish here from there, while more recent projects like “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Again (Given: 1. Pornography 2. Electricity 3. Water)” (2007) tend toward less formal questions of assemblage. This latter work consists of a framed page from a pornographic magazine, two steel window frames enclosing a photograph of a waterfall, an accompanying soundtrack of falling water, and a wooden chair with its seat replaced by a tray of living cacti. As with the best of any contemporary art form, Abbas makes reference to a world beyond the immediate space of the exhibition experience—here, the reference is primarily of an art historical nature—but, without the techniques of either monumentality or documentary, it is difficult to actually construct a history, false or genuine. The artist is here more fundamentally interested in how history functions within space, creating a situation and then drawing in a broader set of aesthetic elements intended to manipulate the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer. Nevertheless, Abbas continues to work at the scale of personal space, even if he does revel in games of perception and participation. Studio practice functions as an activity of scholarly craft, and issues of production—physical or historical—never come into play.

Somewhat uniquely among Hong Kong artists, Adrian Wong does step beyond the confines of the studio and into the territory of fabrication and production; fittingly enough, his work also deals with historical subject matter in a way that the work of Lee Kit and Nadim Abbas do not. Projects like “From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society” (2009), for example, begin from a kernel of history: in this particular case, Wong attempts to reconstruct one of the first films ever shot in Hong Kong through anecdotal notes from those involved in its production or reception. The installation takes the form of two animatronic ducks engaged in a humorous conversation atop modernist Formica pedestals encasing restaurant plateware, a tableau that comes close to suggesting monumentality by virtue of its plinth-like treatment of historical figures and vitrine preparation of artifacts of the past. Here, however, the aspect of performance keeps the assembly as a whole active in a way that precludes it from offering a distinct organization of history; without the intention of permanence, sculpture is unable to make a serious claim for the shaping of the past. Wu Hung might disagree here, citing the capacity of even ancient parchment to function as monument, but I would argue that, in that particular case, it is the mode of preservation of the object that allows it the properties of the monumental, not any intrinsic quality. In addition, Adrian Wong injects a measure of humour into his work that serves to redouble the vitality of performance, seemingly admitting that he has no designs over the rewriting of history (and functioning to subvert a quality of production values to rival the massive installations of the mainland). Instead, it is the reanimation of history that is expanded into spatial practice such that the artist implicates a readymade historical place (or referent of place) within the architectural scene he constructs in the exhibition space. Wong has applied this strategy in other cases as well, as with pieces like “Sang Yat Fai Lok” (2008), in which the artist reenacts children’s television shows from the 1960s and 1970s, the original versions of which were hosted by a distant relative, and creates an appropriate theatrical set. In this case and elsewhere, however, Wong records and exhibits the project primarily through video (although the monitor is typically installed within a portion of its set), abstracting the performance and inserting another layer of the object or artifact within what might otherwise appear as a dangerously historicizing interpretive display.

In this body of work, Adrian Wong opens up for the viewer several possibilities of visual culture for Hong Kong. The artist mines the source material of historical and street culture in order to construct a relationship between the spaces created in his work and the actual social places of the site, but these new spaces of installation in turn transform the general cultural identity of Hong Kong, exploding it outward into a hybrid of globalized visual production. The general visual culture of Hong Kong is determinedly insular, naturally adopting elements of both Western design and Chinese tradition but adapting them into something new entirely. Now that this language of street culture has been codified through decades of film, fashion, theatre, comics, architectural preservation, and other facets of mass media, nostalgic cultural producers are loathe to allow its delicate balance to be disrupted by external factors (most typically in the form of immigration, investment, and intervention from the mainland). Hong Kong culture, this logic holds, is fundamentally Chinese but resides in an already internationalized form that must not be infiltrated by either base Chinese culture or purely global culture; unfortunately, this is a stagnant logic that bars cultural innovation from within as stringently as it blocks new influences from the outside. Of the many possible routes out of this situation, that which has so far proved most productive is the fabrication of spaces of potential and virtuality (that is to say, spaces that create potential for an altered actual environment through the virtual). Installations by the artists discussed here represent such a possibility: conceptual interventions in real space offer visions of an alternative present that stands within the range of reason, ready to be realized if the artist can collapse the marked space of artistic discourse. While Liu Wei and Xu Zhen accomplish this collapse, or, more properly, its reverse, through high production values that create the illusion of semblance, Lee Kit does so by inserting himself into his work and by bringing his finished work back into his studio practice. In one infamous project, Adrian Wong invited Daoist priests to exorcise his studio to similar effect, drawing the actual space of the exhibition into the imagined places of superstition so as to deny any originary difference between the two—between contemporary art and belief. Nadim Abbas, in his latest work, “Cataract” (2010), turned a small gallery space into a shower, creating a scene of indefinite suspense that quoted horror films even as it gestured toward the artist’s own work with the psychoanalytical language of water. Importantly, no major renovation work was necessary to do so—production value was moderate, the illusion was marginal, and the potential place offered through the space of the work remained within the work rather than in the audience perception of the installation.

Whether or not they are related to actual structures or buildings, these are fundamentally projects of architecture, and the design of such spaces of potential emerges particularly clearly in the work of architects influenced by the Hong Kong regime of urbanism. MAP Office, a conceptually oriented studio known for its explorations of the “lean planning” of the Pearl River Delta and the corridor-based component flows of the Hong Kong pedestrian environment, has created such a space in its latest video project, Runscape (2010). Accompanied by the solemn voice of a narrator holding forth on the theoretical implications of the imagery, the video follows young men running through public areas of the city: across pedestrian bridges and rooftops, up outdoor stairs, and down streets, attracting attention not for the novel nature of their antics (this is definitively not parcour) but rather for their sheer speed, for their willingness to activate the horizontal flows of the street without regard to its typical pace. The body is a “bullet that needs no gun,” creating within the urban environment new spaces of action characterized by the body as place.

The designs of Gary Chang, known for his renovation of a reconfigurable apartment that squeezes several dozen possible room configurations into a space of some 300 square feet, accomplish a similar feat. Such an approach to urban density quite literally compresses physical space into a set of layered virtual striations, assuring that the place of the home retains the capacity to expand outward into new territories at any given moment. For his participation in the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, Chang engineers a structure of cage houses (stacked metal cages rented by impoverished single senior citizens) and fluorescent lights (used to indicate the locations of prostitutes), using the intangible materials of light and context to build a mental architecture of the underground that comes to stand in place of the physical structure of the unit. In both cases design is a living entity that is constantly transforming, never allowed the opportunity of monumentality. Intriguingly, it is Douglas Young, a designer and the founder of lifestyle brand Goods of Desire, who applies this strategy most directly to the visual culture of Hong Kong discussed above. Young designed for the global coffee chain Starbucks a restaurant interior that mimics the canonical styles of the local cha chaan teng, a sort of diner characterized by very specific menu styles, flooring, booths, and other architectural features, embedding this new interior environment within a typical Starbucks branch. This explicit commodification of Hong Kong visual identity as novelty implies the packaging and virtualization of its archetypal architectural space, preparing this specific visual style for a global journey through the very products produced by Young’s own design firm (and, of course, film, fashion, and so on). Whatever our qualms, we cannot deny that the creation of a virtual space with the characteristics of actual Hong Kong—and within real Hong Kong—suggests its potential realization elsewhere.

Such modes of production, of course, are far from unique to Hong Kong. The core figures of the short-lived Shenzhen art scene at the turn of the millennium engaged equally with such games of space, working in a mode with even lower production values. This makes sense: Shenzhen popular culture, too, was once strongly influenced by that of Hong Kong, and its forms of urbanization once resembled an understanding of international street life based on the visible features of Hong Kong film and television. Chu Yun’s “Constellation” (2006) has been previously interpreted from this formal angle: the indicator lights of various electric appliances, running silently in a dark room, appear like so many multi-colored stars until the lights turn on and the viewer sees the composition of the scene. Here it is imagination rather than history that fills the void of virtual space created through the formal arrangement of the work, but the effect is similar. In “Unspeakable Happiness 2″ (2003), again, the artist strung the multicolored flags typically used to announce a sale at a mall or car dealership over the space of an exhibition opening, both physically adding new elements to the space (and creating a new space with the triangular geometry of the pyramid) and drawing in new meaning to the event at hand. Key here is the fact that the intervention on the part of the artist was absolutely minimal, operating on the economy of the gesture rather than that of the illusion. Liu Chuang, another core artist of that Shenzhen circle, explored the systemic consequences of such virtual spaces in his installation “Untitled (History of Sweat)” (2007), by which an air conditioner installed in the exhibition gallery drew out and collected the sweat of the audience in a pool on the floor. Viewers were here made aware not necessarily of another space but rather of an alternative dimension—something more corporeal than visual that might still best be described as the virtual. This minimal gesture on the part of the artist, manifested in the reversal of an air conditioner, called in to being an entirely new register of spatial perception suddenly no longer dependent on place, creating not an imagined or fabricated history but rather a new possibility of becoming for the present.

It is tempting to find, in this striking confluence of work from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a quality of blandness perhaps native to the culture of South China, a distinctly Cantonese property that somehow infects its art; it was, after all, the misty landscapes of the south and their distance from political power that inspired the most minimal painting and poetry in past eras. In the scenario of the contemporary, however, distinctions of regional culture are no longer able to exert such universal influence. Zheng Guogu, still based in his hometown of Yangjiang, just west of the Pearl River Delta, remains within the sphere of cultural influence of Hong Kong but displays none of the gestural subtlety found in Shenzhen. More strikingly, the artists of Guangzhou who once set the agenda for artistic practice oriented around the urbanism of the region work almost entirely in rather different modes—though this transition typically occurs after they have left the regional art circles and begun to exhibit nationally and internationally. Cao Fei, for example, has moved from scrappy videos researching the quasi-global youth culture that first infected Guangzhou via Hong Kong and theatrical stagings like “PRD Anti-Heroes” (2005), which resembles the dramatic adaptations pioneered in Hong Kong by Adrian Wong, to the polish and finish of “RMB City” (2009–11), a massively expensive engineered virtual platform for explorations of fictive Chinese urbanism. Lin Yilin, who came to global attention with the performance “Safely Crossing Linhe Road” (1995), in which he moved a brick wall from one side of a road to the other piece by piece, has most recently been crafting larger-than-life sculptures of Mao Zedong wielding an AK-47. Clearly, the spirit of intervention that characterized the bland economy of virtual spaces has given way to a need to finish, a desire for a very certain sort of illusion able to completely hoodwink the spectator into undying trust in a fictional history. Such monumental installation is a totalitarian art in many ways, refusing visual ambiguity even as it embraces the notion of unyielding belief in the invisible promise. This is a transformation of rhetoric, though one that clearly requires something more than geography and space for its completion.

This essay offers no answers to this question; I seek only to trouble the notion that scale is a secondary factor in the production of contemporary art that depends entirely on environmental variables. Despite all this, Hong Kong art is small, and Chinese art is big. That we feel the need to differentiate between these two modes of production, separated by far more than a border and a language gap, speaks volumes about the ongoing changes in the relationships of greater contemporary Chinese art. It is my hope that, understanding the problem of scale as it functions variously in space and place, the production of spaces of potential, a routine reflected in the practices of leading artists in Hong Kong but also in the work of several internationally minded and rarely bombastic mainland artists, might become something of a shared vocabulary able to explode the highly limited visual cultural identity of Hong Kong—and any other similarly situated environment. The notion of a potential monument is almost preposterous. While the artists discussed here have demonstrated the capacity of the monument to create a fabricated ideological and historical background, this equation does not flow in the opposite direction; spaces of potential do not produce monuments. If contemporary art can put aside the art historical pretensions of the avant-garde, engaging instead with the present moment in the constructed cultural environment that surrounds it, a form of potential space—a space that is not yet real and thus is neither virtual nor actual—can emerge in even the smallest studios, and in even the miniature galleries of downtown Hong Kong. This is meant as an infectious proposition, one poised to intervene in the currently overdetermined relationship of space to output. Potential awaits.

Nadim Abbas, Matt Hope + Jon Phillips, Hu Xiangqian,
Huang He, Jin Jiangbo, Leung Chi Wo, Li Jinghu, Adrian Wong

Curated by Venus Lau and Robin Peckham
Organized by the Society for Experimental Cultural Production

Opening 8 January 2011, 17:00 – 21:00
And running through 28 January 2011
Open weekends 12:00 – 18:00
Otherwise by appointment

At the cargo container storage bay
Located adjacent to the Whitehead Club
In Whitehead, Ma On Shan, New Territories, H.K.

The Society for Experimental Cultural Production is pleased to announce The Border Show (边展), a site-specific exhibition of recent art concerned with the border mechanisms of the Pearl River Delta to be staged during the period of Fotanian, Hong Kong’s annual open studio event, from 8 to 28 January 2011.

Taking place inside a set of shipping containers placed amid the hulking post-industrial buildings of the New Territories halfway between the urban cores of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, this exhibition proposes a new relationship between these two cities and the wider region by approaching the ontology of the border crossing. Rather than allowing the various art communities of the area to misapprehend highly localized situations of cultural production as representative of the Delta as a whole, radically open work can instead build connections between audiences by advancing new possibilities for art in cross-border living.

This exhibition exists both within and literally as the marginal spaces between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, interrogating the operation of the manufacturing-shipment complex of the Pearl River Delta region. Participating projects will be first installed in the disused containers of the New Territories in January 2011; at a later date in the spring, the work and its containers will be removed to a disused industrial area of Shenzhen. The status of the border crossing is thus materialized by the presence of the exhibition itself in these two archetypal spaces of production and trade.

Participating artists for the first portion of the exhibition in Hong Kong include Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong), Laoban Soundsystem (Matt Hope and Jon Phillips, Beijing), Hu Xiangqian (Guangzhou), Huang He (Guangzhou), Jin Jiangbo (Shanghai), Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong), Li Jinghu (Dongguan), and Adrian Wong (Hong Kong). Collectively, their work examines the psychology of architecture, the engineering of sound, interventions in local politics, fengshui and space, the economy in regional urbanism, migration and settlement, the visibility of labor, gray markets, shanzhai culture, and the biopolitics of identity.

The opening reception will include a sunset barbecue on the harborside with live music provided by a variant of the Laoban Soundsystem engineered by participating artists Matt Hope and Jon Phillips. All are welcome into the evening. Additional events will be organized on 15 and 22 January, and a pamphlet on the exhibition will be produced for the closing reception.

To reach the exhibition site, take the MTR to Wu Kai Sha Station and follow the signs to the Whitehead Club Driving Range (白石俱乐部), approximately 10-15 minutes by foot. Alternatively, shuttle bus service is available directly to the Whitehead Club from Shatin Town Hall every hour on the half hour until 20:30, or from Sunshine City every half hour until 22:45. The Club is widely recognized by cab and other drivers. From the entrance to the Whitehead Club, follow the parking lot driveway between the golf driving range and the barbecue restaurants to arrive at the container lot. For questions, you may reach us at 5181-5156 (English) or 5181-2762 (Cantonese), or at the email addresses listed on the contact page.

The place of spirituality in the Western art of our time is more or less clear: innovative art has consistently defined itself in relationship to mainstream religion, and the heritage of symbols and sensations of affect from the Christian tradition remains steady across the board, even given the onslaught of new ideas and systems of belief toward this core set of religious understanding. This status now provides a workable framework for contemporary artists wishing to make reference to broader spiritual and political hierarchies and aesthetics, as with market-topping work from the likes of Koons and Hirst throughout the past two decades. Such work, obsessed with an aesthetics of consumerism, often positions transient objects as monumental figures of idolatry: the former is probably best known for his transformations of balloons into large-scale steel sculptures, as with “Balloon Dog” (1994-2000). Although the imagery is mundane, the method is indubitably marked by notions of worship and immortality. Lest there be any doubt, Hirst spells out the equation in the most blatant terms: “The Golden Calf” (2008) literally crafts the figure of its title within the tinted vitrine that has come to characterize a certain tendency in scientific spirituality in contemporary art. More recently, emerging art has come to approach spirituality through the aesthetics of new age practice: altars, magic, crystals, and communication with the supernatural have become standard features in low-key showcases of new art. Jen Denike’s “Crystal Forest” (2010) presents one such vision, a tower of crystalline objects atop a mirrored table surrounded by concentric rings of stone.

Interestingly enough, this supernatural aesthetics also appears in the contemporary art of greater China and its diaspora, perhaps as a stand-in for certain spiritual inclinations in view of the lack of an overarching organized religious tradition. Singaporean artist Michael Lee, for example, made an impact with his “Consulting the Supernatural” (2009), a large-scale wall diagram that analyzed relationships (potential and otherwise) between the participating artists and curators at an exhibition in Taipei. That particular project, which included methodologies drawn from Western and Chinese astrological systems alike, had the side effect of comparing the possibilities between these various cultural ways of understanding the social world. In Hong Kong, American-born artist Adrian Wong is interested in the opposite function: confronted with the potential haunting of his studio, he organized a public exorcism that ultimately became the work “Bless All Ye Who Enter Here” (2007), indulging in the visual culture of Taoist tradition but also providing a litmus test of spiritual belief for visitors, many of whom remain disturbed in some way by the atmosphere in that particular studio. Pak Sheung Chuen, also based in Hong Kong, often makes more sincere reference to religious sentiment in his work, one of the few artists working from an explicitly Christian perspective to do so with a respectable degree of subtlety–he once found a quotation from a verse of scripture in the vertically-aligned characters of his grocery receipt.

In mainland China, on the other hand, references to spiritual tradition often take the form of obscene allusions to a certain aesthetic of pseudo-Daoism (including, of course, elements of Confucianism and folk tradition, among other things, here referred to as Daoism because of its major philosophical leanings) that many seem to identify with the literati heritage in Chinese painting. More often than not, however, this highly aestheticized set of practices functions most often as a foil, as when Huang Yong Ping facetiously adopted the mantle of Xiamen Dada in order to produce an exaggerated collision between systems of thinking, or else as a universal sign of Chinese identity, as with the abstracted mythological signifiers of Cao Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder paintings. Last year in Shenzhen, during the marathon conversation organized by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist entitled “The Chinese Thinking,” many participants agreed that religious belief in China has been replaced, after the upheavals of twentieth century modernist ideology, with a reverence for history; this notion may prove more productive for the place of spirituality in art. Many major artists already deal with the cartography of cultural systems through time: Dong Wensheng, Qiu Anxiong, Gao Shiqiang, and Qiu Zhijie all continue to pursue large-scale projects in which rosters of iconography, historical texts, and the capacity for belief all congeal in a melting pot of identity definition. Increasingly, the spiritual is the register on which this action–critically or not–comes to occur.

Characterized by a reflective architecture of glass and steel and culturally dominated by a visually rich cinematic tradition that merges seamlessly with tourism marketing, Hong Kong does not lack for specular images of its urban core. In the now classic films of Wong Kar-Wai and John Woo, the surface of the city emerges primarily through textural definition: the sweaty glint of neon on wet pavement, the contrast of floral patterned gowns against red lacquer furniture, the misty hillside just beyond the window. The collective body of the city, on the other hand, is presented through a constantly expanding archive of symbols that are attached to a restricted set of personae; that is to say, whereas the same group of some two dozen admittedly charismatic actors have dominated the silver screen for several decades, they have endured countless permutations through affiliation with a large number of talismanic props and other objects that construct the imagined community of literary Hong Kong as a myth of enduring cultural continuity. There are the small fishing boats in the typhoon shelters, the ferries, the electric trams, the qipao, Lion Rock, martial arts swords, southern barbecue, Cantonese opera masks, vampire teeth, paper sacrifices, triad cleavers, lanterns—the list is almost inexhaustible, and yet these features have come to stand in for the collective visual identity of Hong Kong in a way that no particular neighborhood, celebrity face, or architectural style could.

Artist Adrian Wong absorbs and regurgitates in altered form no small number of these talismanic symbols, venturing often into filmic territory to borrow narratives, reconstruct dialogues, and build up surreal yet iconic settings. For Wong, however, the social value of such objects lies not as much with their representative qualities as with the possibilities for absurd storytelling and formal aesthetic features that they offer. The most significant aspect of his growing body of work is indubitably its willingness to play fast and loose with the hallowed if commonplace signifiers of culture and identity, loosening the binds between object and narrative, image and context in a way that contributes back to the parent culture even as it presents highly stylized and aestheticized but never iconic depictions of these visual styles to an imagined theatrical audience via a vaguely universal and totalizing sensibility. In some ways, Wong does for the quirky traditional street cultures of Hong Kong what the appropriation artists of postmodern painting and collage did for global trash culture, sincerely lending it new life by way of circulation throughout the well-lubricated channels of the international art world. Key to this process is the simultaneous production of both imagery writ large and images in the particular: in much of this work, the artist brings forth an understanding of the scene as a site for the manufacture of culture, providing needed if incoherent nourishment for the microcultures from which he draws raw contextual material. There is, for example, his large scale installation “Sang Yat Fai Lok” (2008), which builds upon research into local television programs Calvin’s Corner, Children’s Corner, and Happy Birthday, all of which were shot between 1960 and 1975 but of which there are no remaining copies. After discovering family ties to host personality Calvin Wong Hay, Wong engaged in geneaological and televisual research into the programming of that time, employing family photographs, production stills, and newspaper archives to create a set containing a brightly colored puppet stage, midcentury furniture, nostalgic pastel wall images depicting trees, a greater-than-life-sized stuffed pink dolphin, and dried fish—among other things. Recording reconstructed episodes of the program on this set, a disconcertingly enthused Wong himself appears as the host in his own interpretation, leaving behind in documentation a series of photographs that negotiate an extinct visual culture into a position equally at home in the historical archives and in the contemporary art records of the present.

On the other hand, virtually all of his projects also involve still images that specifically and concretely offer objects for aesthetic appreciation as if they were sacrificial dioramas served upon the altar of the audience. In a stunt that made him infamous amongst the chattering classes of the Hong Kong media, Wong released a photograph of himself kissing a chicken around the height of the avian influenza scare in south China, attempting to push past the ingrained fears of impure biological life forms that sees an entire population reject its local sources of food at the slightest warning from above. Entitled “Sak Gai” (2007), this brief performance actually made use of a freshly slaughtered but not yet plucked chicken carcass rather than the trained, live bird he originally claimed; nevertheless, the photographic image continues to circulate today, particularly as an example of the alienation of contemporary art from social concerns. In terms of the status of the image, this project may be most significant for its reliance on the unchanging semblance of the digital photograph itself, which can be and often is easily separated from the conceptual narrative from which it originally emerged. Similarly, a recent project known as “Bromide Series 1-4” (2010) involves photography of every food item consumed by the artist over the course of a single day, again interpellating the viewer as an accessory to the mythologies of Hong Kong through the predictable inclusion of comestibles like dim sum and cha chaan teng noodles alongside barbecued lamb chops and fresh vegetables. Posed in a highly artificial manner against a textured infinity wall of bold, slightly retro cloth prints, these perishable objects take on a life of their own exclusively through the composition of the image, gaining the consciousness of intersubjectivity through their new-found immanent ability to pose as portraits on the gallery wall.

Almost uniquely within the artistic practices common throughout greater China, Adrian Wong develops many of these projects through a rigorous research-based methodology that draws from his academic background in child psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. Although never willing to divulge the abstractions of data and archival material in his final work, preferring to work through adapted techniques of craft and kitsch, Wong often spends months in preparation for major projects, carrying out interviews with involved figures and their descendants, reading through the existing literature, and delving into what filmic and textual archives exist in Hong Kong. “Sang Yat Fai Lok” clearly evinces such methods, as does the landmark installation “From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society” (2009), a part of a broad research program with its own intrinsic historical value developed in conjunction with Word Asia Publishing House. Exhibited ostensibly on the occasion of the centenary of fictional film in Hong Kong, the project attempts to reconstruct the dialogue and contextual history of the first such movie, entitled Stealing a Roast Duck and directed by Liang Shaopo with the funding of Benjamin Brodsky and the cinematography of Roland Van Velzer. Ultimately taking the form of two animatronic ducks on a campy formica podium against a background of patterned panels derived from a popular style of locally produced paper cups, Wong’s interpretation offered a crass and by no measure comprehensive conversation revolving around certain aspects of the production of the film. According to legend and later anecdotal interviews, Roast Duck involved an intricate set of coded messages intended to facilitate the overthrow of the Qing regime in Beijing to be circulated through San Francisco and other revolutionary enclaves; such apocryphal notations here function as fertile ground for ruminations on ideas of cultural codes, transmission, and translation across both time as space. Appropriately, many of these always controversial claims have recently been proven false: the film was actually at least the fourth film produced by the team involved in the year 1914 alone, well after the last Qing emperor was deposed.

This process of the excavation of memory and archaeology of media artifacts surfaces again in “Umbrellahead, I Will Find You” (2010), a cooperative theatrical production that reached the stage only after groundbreaking research into the historical urban conditions of Western District in the earliest colonial settlements of Hong Kong. While interviewing residents of the area for a heritage-based project, Wong and his collaborators noted repeated reference to the story of a certain Lei Mei, a stunning actress who attained wide recognition and won many admirers locally before traveling to the West, entering a disastrously infelicitous marriage, and ultimately dying young in an asylum. As it happens, this entire story is an apocryphal didactic tale concocted by Chinese-language media in order to worn against the moral evils of profane Western ways; that a number of the elderly residents interviewed seemed to sincerely believe that this fictional character had married a cousin of a cousin or seduced a friend of an end could never be substantiated. Finding a certain pleasure in the tenacity of such beautiful memories, Wong transformed the tale into a surreal stage play in which objects like umbrellas, in reference to one of the last professional umbrella craftsman interviewed for the project, and the cases of musical instruments no longer existing since the Cultural Revolution, become characters in their own right. The exaggerated colors and architectural construction of the stage set once again provide a scene on which the specific images of these symbolic objects appear as detached apparitions of something lost to history but gained on behalf of both local memory and the vocabulary of forms within the international art world.

Another series of works, including “Bless All Ye Who Enter Here” (2007), “Tuhng Gwai Wan” (2007), and “Seih” (2005) circulates around a more personal experience of never-quite-archaic local culture that later expanded into a full-fledged investigation of the wider forces of economy and belief. Working out of an industrial studio widely understood to be haunted, Wong suffered a series of misfortunates ranging from the loss of personal belongings to massive and medically inexplicable internal bleeding that stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leading him to engage with the systems and rites of superstition in the popular mindset. “Tuhng Gwai Wan” collects, through an extensive research-based process, a textual list and explanation of various Taoist and other mystical rituals positioned alongside a table bearing all of the bizarre herbs, stones, and other physical materials involved in such events. Pushing the project to an extreme, “Bless All Ye Who Enter Here” invites Taoist priests to perform an exorcism to clarify the space. Throughout all this, Wong himself maintains an attitude of sympathetic disbelief, never sure if or when to give in to faith in the supernatural forces that manipulate the real estate market and other economic fields through hauntings and other uncanny events.

This particular project is culturally possible and even legible largely due to Wong’s personal identity, raised in the United States but maintaining a range of familial connections to Hong Kong. Far from indulging in the incoherence of such privileged identity politics, however, Wong tends to utilize this position as a passing outsider to his advantage, approaching with a certain sense of detachment forbidden territory that is typically spoken of deadly seriously or not at all, as with the exorcism of “Bless All Ye Who Enter Here” and the avian intimacy of “Sak Gai.” This position allows the artist to extract any notable aesthetic content from wider systems that he may not fully understand or trust, contributing to a sense of alienation from the activity depicted while bringing it into closer contact with his own training as a sculptor and psychologist. Many of the titles of these works consist of romanized Cantonese, a language with no definite alphabetic transliteration system of its own spoken only in the southern Chinese province of Guagdong, the regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and their respective diasporas abroad; this linguistic ambiguity, as confusing for readers of Chinese as for the uninitiated, tends to hold back a certain measure of explication that is then shifted to the position of the the work itself. “Haak Seh Wuih Tuhng Mau Jai” (2007) is one such example, a short video of an obviously choreographed dance in which four shirtless, tattooed men delicately and occasionally violent dance with a small cat: in translation, the titled should read “Triads with Kitten,” an absurd reframing of the gangster identity so easily stereotyped in Hong Kong cinema.

In other works, the professional assistance of the choreographer here is replaced by that of the acting coach, evincing an interest in the external experience of identity influenced by both the subjective portrayal of the self within a second-language society and the failure of objectivity in the psychoanalytical reading. “Tuhng Ngoh Dei Wan” (2007), for example, involves three pregnant mainland women illegally smuggled into Hong Kong and trained by a professional acting coach to act and respond as they themselves believed mainland Chinese were perceived by local Hong Kong Chinese. Seated at a small table, the women harass visitors to join their mahjong game, ridiculing and otherwise tormenting their gambling partners. Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, no video of this performance exists, leaving the photograph once again to stand in as both evidence and representation of the work. Fitting the sartorial stereotypes of mainland visitors to Hong Kong and clutching mahjong tiles, the women depicted in these images both exist within and perform from the outside the identities to which they are assumed to belong. The notion of exaggerated behavior appears again with a new series of “Affective Portraits” (2010) in which acting coaches coax the subjects of the photographs to perform certain emotions. By relating particularly painful memories and via other rhetorical techniques, the affective positions of the posing subjects thus occasionally appear authentic to a greater or lesser degree, again projecting from the outside an identity or behavior that does not necessarily exist anywhere within the circumscribed space of the subject in terms of its own self-knowledge. Installed in three-dimensional frames mimicking crystalline structures, these images are thus further disrupted in a way that underscores not the fragmentation of identity common to the postmodern mode but rather the always-already instability of the images on which this body of work so heavily relies.

Although his artistic career began with a series of delightfully minimalistic and referential sculptures, in particular “Boidae C. Constrictor” (2005), which appears as a snake in three block-like sections, and “I Love You But I Can’t Be With You” (2005), which constructs highly formalist relationships between goldfish in round tanks, Wong has since tended towards excess in many respects. Minimalism, of course, is no ally of the theater, and it is the mode of live storytelling that emerges most successfully in these ornate and excessive productions and performances of research-based historical material. Narrative, however, is consigned to the position of an element of the scene, all in an effort to refine and process the totality of the story at hand into a set of images that, though never intended to stand in as iconic representations in their own right, nevertheless function as a symbolic currency contributed to discourses of art and contemporary culture. Most significantly, the roles played by history and identity are considerably tempered by a self-conscious humor that pervades much of this work, from the joking ducks of “From the Annals of the Harmony Jade Roast Meat Society” to “Tunnel Vision” (2008), a dramatization of the artist’s own colonoscopy, and “Fountain” (2006), a sculptural take on the ritualized practice of washing plateware in boiling dark tea before proceeding to eat at any meal. Ultimately, it is this comedic element—indubitably a strategy to cope with the play of multifold identities along the lines of the alienation produced by Cantonese transliteration—that positions Adrian Wong beyond the exclusive discourses of theater and neo-minimalism and in a cultural territory that sits at odds with both existing identity-based artistic practices in Hong Kong and formalist practices in the artist’s other home of Los Angeles. The images he produces so copiously, sometimes in series, sometimes in moving form, and sometimes singly, persist in a process of often forceful contribution to the symbolic orders that refuse to allow these projects to enter as works of art per se; their status as imagery only entrenches the ideas they carry ever more deeply into the foundations of defensive cultural architectures that attempt to keep them out.

During a recent debate over sound art that seemed to grip several quarters of the Hong Kong art world for the better part of the summer of 2010, one of the recurring topics of discussion was the relationship between art and music. Dominated by figures emerging from the contemporary classical and experimental spheres, however, this has been a distinctly theoretical conversation, revolving around the parallel but temporally offset historical development paths taken by the contexts of music—in and beyond the concert hall—and art—in and beyond the white cube of the gallery. Setting aside, for a moment, the many sensitive and intelligent artists working with sound as material, medium, and genre, of which there are many in China–from Yan Jun in Beijing to Yao Dajuin in Taipei and Cedric Maridet in Hong Kong–one particularly overlooked territory may yet contribute something additional to the field: that of independent popular music.

This is a fraught topic, one that often devolves all too quickly into hype for “genre-spanning hipsters” and other distasteful members of the fray labeled “creative China.” On the other hand, this was also, until recently, a marker of some cultural resentment, especially as the period that saw musicians like Zuoxiao Zuzhou sharing live-work space in the East Village with artists like Ai Weiwei gave way to the auction bubble for Chinese contemporary art and international obscurity for domestic music. For the historical background to this transition, see the important scholarly work on politics, identities, and relationships within and between these two communities carried out by critic and curator Maya Kóvskaya. The topic of this column, however unfortunately, is both less expansive and more prosaic, attempting to examine several of the more recent instances of exchange between contemporary art and independent pop music in an effort to determine what further dialogue might be able to accomplish, and what alterations to this process may be necessary.

In Hong Kong, at least two of the leading artists working locally also lead independent bands. Nadim Abbas, who has lent keyboard and vocals to the disco punk and modulated noise quarter A Roller Control since 2008, is recognized primarily for his visual work, as with the project installed in the Hong Kong Museum of Art exhibition The Hong Kong Seven that compared the varying shapes of window barriers to Rorschach blots and assigned a new superhero identity for each. Having completed advanced formal studies in literary theory and being widely read in critical modalities, Abbas represents a more intellectual pole of the Southern Chinese art scene. With A Roller Control, on the other hand, he fabricates walls of noise uniquely suited to art contexts—which is appropriate, given that the best live music venues in the city more or less recreate the rote/cookie-cutter post-industrial shells from which gallery spaces are created. This is a new incarnation for the group—which previously emphasized more danceable styles—but this seems likely to stick given the increasing preponderance of large-scale cultural festivals, exhibitions, and other events, even as longstanding performance venues like the Fringe Club fade into the background of the local scene.

Also in Hong Kong is the part-time resident, Adrian Wong, who teaches for a portion of the year at the University of California in Los Angeles. He has just recently taken the helm of an energetic group that has seen a quick succession of names, and is at the moment working under the label Fantastic, I Love You. Born and educated in the United States, Wong brings the tactics of rigorous archival and scientific research coupled with a crude sense of humor to the Chinese art world, thus rarely fitting in amongst the more subdued artists emerging from the official Hong Kong art education system. His latest project may be the consummate demonstration of this approach, investigating sobriety as a parameter of expressive performance and offering an unbridled space of energy to a quiet scene.

Artists moonlighting as musicians (or musicians making art, or dilettantes trying out a bit of everything) are nothing new, of course; this is a long-standing tradition in many parts of the world, and the nexus of independent music and experimental art has played an integral role in the historical development of scenes from Los Angeles of the 1960s to the Lower East Side of the 1980s. In Hong Kong, however, this offers new possibilities for less systematic, more purely affective or sensory approaches to the creation of cultural objects, creating a plane of exchange removed from the straitjacketed processes of traditionally insular studio practice that is derived from an odd imagination of scholarly painting implicit to the post-colonial ideologies of education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from which (until recently) the majority of practicing local artists graduated. We are also beginning to note similar trends in mainland China, though the quality of musical practice in that situation is highly variable.

The most interesting example at the moment may be the relationship between N12, a group of painters who studied together at the Central Academy of Fine Arts that once included now well-known figures like Qiu Xiaofei and Wang Guangle, and Shanshui, a record label operated by Sun Dawei that represents 8-bit and intelligent dance music artists like Sulumi (a stage moniker for Sun himself), Liman, Dead J, and B6. Recognizing that commercial success had bolstered visual art long before music, a nebulous organization known as the N12 Foundation has offered funding for publicity and compilation publications for the label, while Shanshui events have also seen participation from a crowd of like-minded painters and other artists. This cooperative relationship is no doubt spurred on by the relationship between Cao Yang, the lead singer of the respected electronic rock band Exit A, and N12, though it should be said that there is also a certain overlap in terms of aesthetic sensibility, as with A Roller Control and Fantastic, I Love You in Hong Kong.

Other attempts at cross-genre synergy, as with those by the Modern Media music critic, Jian Cui, the second-rate punk musician, Wang (Gia) Yue, of Hang on the Box, and others to present themselves as artists, often under the aegis of exhibitions and markets known as “Mary Inn” and organized by You Yang, have fallen remarkably flat, offering stunningly naive interpretations of the discourses of contemporary art. Falling into this latter category, too, would be the “graphic art” with which many self-consciously hip foreign observers and young Chinese are enamored, works that offer nothing whatsoever for intelligent viewers and do little to enhance the music, design, and apparel with which it is associated. Much of this activity is carried out in hopes of building wider markets for this material, an explicitly statistics-oriented commercial aim for which serious artists and musicians have little patience.

These highly visible missteps notwithstanding, the transferral of artistic energies into music (and, more occasionally, of musical energies into art, though this asymmetry derives more from the primary position of independent music in the popular consciousness rather than the elitism of high culture) can be extraordinarily productive in venting some of the pretensions attendant to the professional practice of art in a society largely ignorant of and removed from international cultural histories. This can occur through the changing relationships between subject and audience, a distinction that has attracted so much commentary in the literature that it requires no further theoretical articulation here. In the art exhibition, which is typically open to the public but limited to geographically marginal sites, entities that range from environments to objects and images rarely ever offer personal presence, no matter how impressive they may appear. In this model, such phenomena are intended for review by a large audience but, ultimately, for consumption by only a minority. In the musical performance, live human bodies present a rehearsed but transient experience funded jointly by all viewers. These two divergent models indeed can lend theoretical support for experiments in configuration within both distinct discourses; the key to success lies primarily within focus on the assemblage of the scene, as outlined here, and aesthetic coherence or at least stylistic consistency. This is where so many musicians-cum-artists fail: a lack of respect for disciplinary histories and boundaries allows for an undiscerning desire for linkage and connection between scenes and individuals, thereby bringing in cultural products with no meaningful relationship to the work at hand. Fortunately, the art scenes of Hong Kong and mainland China alike find in the karaoke lounge a litmus test pertaining to the viability of this crossover, a filter that discriminates between the endlessly devolving and overlapping categories of artist, musician, consumer, and pretender.

Marcel Duchamp inaugurated one of the manifold lineages of experimental art in the twentieth century with a push towards what he termed “non-retinal art,” launching a plea for the conceptual and the contextual; clearly, these were fertile seeds indeed. Duchamp’s thesis called for a break with art that functioned primarily on a visual level, if such a thing existed at all, but it was not long before a counterpoint emerged in the parallel narratives of minimalism and, ultimately, op art. But the non-retinal for Duchamp was more than this guarded dualism; in fact, this phrase was coined with particular reference to art that took as its primary concern the making and definition of art, a history that, in some models, reached its apex between the 1913 Armory Show and Malevich’s 1921 monochromes. Although this latter painter may have been working at the notion from the opposite direction, Duchamp insisted on the primacy of the mind, if not concept itself, over the visual plane.

It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that the visual plane was categorically dominant throughout Western art history prior to Duchamp’s intervention. Likewise, the field of music, from classical through to the avant-garde, rarely ever entailed a purely aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, it found its iconoclast in the person of John Cage, even if his revolution proved to enact a different situation entirely. This revolution was later wrapped up in the phrase “sound-in-itself,” although Cage himself rarely if ever employed the term, and it offered a wholly transcendental proposition: that “pure sound,” distinct from both music and noise, could mobilize a universalizing function. (This may be one of the root concepts behind Boris Groys’s oft-cited “weak universalism,” which, appropriately enough, discusses the monochromatic Malevich works as a major influence.) Cage also wished to dethrone the privileged status of the visual, resisting the popular model of sensation in which most auditory composition must invoke or emerge from some corresponding visual phenomenon.

This restitution of the aural found an unlikely second wave in Derek Jarman, the cult film director known within the art world as much for his garden as for his collaborations with sound artists and pop musicians on projects that could only loosely be termed music videos. Most pertinently, his haunting last film, Blue, consists of seventy-nine minutes of saturated blue and poetic audio narration; composed as the artist himself was going blind due to AIDS-related complications, the piece represents a struggle with the hegemonic terms of visuality, seemingly closing off the painterly films of Jarman’s earlier career. Derived from the monochromes of Yves Klein, themselves a lush if psuedo-spiritual rejoinder to the non-retinal Malevich, this continuous frame of blue has come to occupy an iconic position in the trajectory of queer theory. One critic has even set the soundtrack-oriented film in opposition to the opening lines of the Metaphysics: from Aristotle’s “above all others the sense of sight” to Jarman’s “pray to be released from the image.”

This last critical attempt may come across as hyperbolic, but there is no denying these ruptures in the narratives of genre and style. Potentially equaling these incidents in terms of gravity and import is Seth Kim-Cohen’s 2009 publication of the tome In the Blink of an Ear. Therein, the artist and scholar argues for a rereading of sound art history, looking towards a “non-cochlear” approach to sound art that would owe more to Duchamp than to the currently dominant justifications of sound-in-itself. Kim-Cohen cites the militant medium-specificity of high modernism as a key culprit in the transformation of sound art into a form of music culturally acceptable independent of context, and in response gestures towards the intertextuality of virtually all sonic artifacts produced today: the friction between sight and sound is collapsed, instead productively giving way to a biologically but not conceptually phenomenological model of perception.

The thesis may seem overwrought to observers of contemporary art, who will be familiar with the use of sound as a component of any number of artists otherwise working in the rhetoric of the conceptual. Indeed, sonic moving parts and, increasingly, speaker cones have become an often requisite element of such installations in the expanded field: one need only recall Bruce Nauman’s “Days,” which premiered in the 2009 Venice Biennale with several rows of whispering speakers, or, closer to home, Adrian Wong’s talking ducks and mumbling stuffed figures, or even the collaborative project recently installed by Vito Acconci and Ai Weiwei. But, like video art that happens to include an audio track, these projects do not consciously or rigorously engage with the notion of sound as medium, nor do they operate within the history of the last half-decade of what has become known as sound art.

Unfortunately, any use of sonic properties within contemporary art practice is often handed the mantle of successful sound art, even if the work in question more properly belongs to another genre entirely. In mainland China, for example, experimental musicians, noise performers, and sound artists are quite often all included in the same festival programs, live shows, and exhibitions: excluded by the art establishment on the one hand and the institutions of classical music and the performing arts on the other, this motley crew has successfully created a scene, but all at the expense of serious engagement with the material itself. In the midst of a deluge of field recordings and patches for the absurdly pervasive (and almost always pirated) Max/MSP/Jitter software package, critics have begun to wonder: Why are all of these artists using sound in the first place? How do they differentiate their practices from music or sculpture? What are they discovering about sound and how this material fits into the narrative arcs of the conceptual and the retinal?

At the limit case of “non-cochlear sound” or conceptual sound art, we approach the asymptotic value of sound without sound. Sound, removed from sound art, does not necessarily lead to the purely conceptual; indeed, it could be an intensely sensory experience in its own right, as with Stephen Vitiello’s “Fear of High Places and Natural Things” (2004). In this installation, a set of speaker cones hang from the gallery ceiling, emitting no tones audible to the human ear but nevertheless vibrating constantly. There is a sense of the uncanny at work here, imparting a feeling of nervous terror that functions physically through sound waves but aesthetically through both the visual and the tactile. Clearly borrowing the vocabulary of sound art in the form of the speaker cones, the piece nevertheless moves beyond sound proper–or perhaps defines the territory at stake in this distinction.

Similarly, former rock musician turned multimedia dramatist Feng Jiangzhou transforms sound into pressure with his installation “The Discipline in Four Parts” (2008). In a darkened cylindrical space, the visitor sits passively on a short stool surrounded by a steel cage on which some twenty speakers are positioned, emitting vast multi-channel compositions designed to disorient and construct an alternative sensation of space. Sound remains very much present in this project, but moves from a one-dimensional sonic experience to a hacking of auditory sensation for the purpose of building an invisible architecture defined by a medium rarely called upon to play such a role. Confidence in a knowable conceptual origin is disoriented in tandem with the simultaneous displacement of sonic origin. Visual deprivation may be a simplistic maneuver, but here the psuedo-musical compositions that recreate the space can be analogous to the psueo-poetic narration that recreates the visual for Derek Jarman.

Although critic-cum-musician-cum-curator-cum-artist Yan Jun launched his artistic practice with the a series of field recordings transferred directly from released on his experimental record label to the exhibition space in a darkened room, he has since moved on to an increasingly interesting series of ventures into the space of sound within contemporary art, aided by the curators of Vitamin Creative Space. In one sculpture formally resembling the Stephen Vitiello installation noted above, a lone speaker cone sits perched on top of speaker case housing; the cone vibrates and even jumps to the low rumbling sound of a heartbeat of some kind, but it is visually unclear whether this sound is actually emitted by the housing below or the cone above. This sense of ambiguity frees the piece as a whole from becoming too closely tied to the auditory experience, drawing forth an almost physical compulsion to touch the vibrating elements personally.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Hong Kong composer and artist Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to reexamine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. The hope shared by the artists and writers described above, however, is that this notion of sound can find a possibility for expression and consideration in an anti-essentialist space defined as much by the cognitive as by the aural, and as much by critical reflection as by enthusiastic volunteerism. It is a goal that should resonate with other once-struggling genres, and it will no doubt continue to resonate through the gallery spaces that propose to contain it.

“Resonance: Exhibition, Performance, Talks”
Published as publicity materials by Input/Output Gallery. This text describes the specific exhibition program that emerged from the critical discussions mentioned above.
Text by Robin Peckham and Rachel Connelly.

Resonance is an exhibition about the word sound. It is about the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, and the usage of the word; that is to say, it asks what sound is, how sound is used, and what sound can do. One may wonder why an artist would choose to work with sound, as opposed to music or visual art, but would find that answers are rarely forthcoming.

Resonance attempts to present an abstracted territory for this dialogue, stripping sound down to its most basic elements; the same elements that contribute to the other creative modes and methods in question. Just as Seth Kim-Cohen, working in the Duchampian conceptual tradition in his book In the Blink of an Ear, has called for an art of “non-cochlear sound” opposed to the “sound-in-itself” associated with John Cage, this project wonders what happens when the sound is removed from sound art. As an exhibition, it engages in the transformation of music into sound, of sound into pressure, and of the sonic into an anti-essentialist conceptual program.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to re-examine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. Input/Output Gallery presents the works of two artists currently working through this problem: Samson Young, the Hong Kong composer, scholar, and artist known for his contributions to everything from game art to new classical performance, and Yao Chung-Han, the Taipei-based sound artist widely recognized for his research into the breakdown points of the technological matrix that surrounds us. Both are representatives of the new wave of emerging sound cultures across greater China and into the international sphere, offering new points of entry into these questions.

Yao Chung-Han here includes the installation, “I Will Be Broken” (2010), a floor-to-ceiling suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together in a mesmerizing totem with its own power cords. As the piece slowly strangles itself into forced obsolescence with the surges of electricity through both body and frame, its lighting sources fluctuate along with a soft, uncanny buzzing. Although the visual spectacle and conceptual nervousness are at first domineering, the work functions primarily on the level of and through the medium of sound, emitting an atonal and unpredictable sound that requires attention by virtue of its low volume and commands consideration based on its ever-evolving almost organic state. Here, sound is a by-product that comes to both lead and stand in for an abstract choreography of relevance and terror that plays out on the stages of perception, ultimately creating an un-composed cacophony through physical experience.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

I/O Gallery is proud to offer a stage for these explorations of physical sensation, cognition, composition, temporality, and destruction. Conceived in collaboration with the Society for Experimental Cultural Production, this exhibition–along with an associated series of performances and talks featuring Yang Yeung, Cedric Maridet, and Yao Dajuin among others–hopes to throw into relief the problems that mark discourses of sound, art, music, and new media today, contributing to an ongoing conversation.

Text by Robin Peckham.

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Kingsley Ng, “Record: Light,” 2008, 3’06″

“Record: Light” presents a seemingly tranquil view of Central district in Hong Kong at night, including several of the landmark architectural features that characterize the area. Both street level and the highest points of the tallest buildings are elided from the frame. A meditative soundtrack reminiscent of those applied to public television documentary features pushes calmly forward with the real-time, black-and-white video image. At Victoria Peak, the flashes of tourist photography briefly mimic the sustained lights of the buildings below. Though it may be the central content of the video, this phenomenon is barely notable to the casual viewer. Kingsley Ng here betrays an interest in an aesthetics of abstracted light and sound coupled with a compositional instinct; though the visual framing of the skyline might recall Andy Warhol’s infamous “Empire” (1964), “Record: Light” is in fact much more closely related to its urban content than to any idea of meta-level play with viewing conventions (except, perhaps, the ways of seeing inherent to the amateur photographers whose activity is captured in the piece). The moment captured here is a beautiful one, and its aesthetic value is further enhanced by a soundtrack that we might imagine as the romantic background music enjoyed by those viewing this same scene from the Peak–or even as their own creation. This strategy was further abstracted by the artist in an accompanying piece in which the camera flashes were mapped onto a metal disc that can then be played as a primitive sound system.

Hung Keung, “Upstairs/ Downstairs: A Dialogue with Hong Kong,” 2004, 8′

“Upstairs/ Downstairs: A Dialogue with Hong Kong” appears as a progression of still images interspersed with a number of video clips, perhaps adhering to a narrative logic or, equally likely, eschewing a single structural progression for a more geographic exploration of its subject. Occasionally, two frames will appear simultaneously, stacked vertically one above the other, most often creating a visual tension between a moving image and a still frame. The settings range from a high-end mall in Mongkok to a traditional market in Yaumatei, but most of these backgrounds all contain a similar focal point: a solitary young woman, sometimes talking on the phone, often standing in front of a wall or window. In many segments, she or they wear two halves of distinct clothing styles, beginning with a dress on one side and a pantsuit on the other and cycling through several iterations. The video is silent in its entirety. Notable images include: fish tanks, the fastening of a white shirt, a supermarket, and pieces of clothing discarded in settings like daipaidong and cha chaan teng restaurants. Notable editing techniques include the rapid manipulation of color filters, a total fade, and partial framing of major images like faces and buildings. This fast-changing series of images deals with notions of local identity and the density of lived experience, reflecting the historical and architectural backdrops of its filming sites.

Silas Fong, “When the Door Opens,” 2008, 7’49″

At the opening of “When the Door Opens,” a young man stands in front of the glass doors in an MTR station, waiting for the train to arrive. Passersby cross in front of the seemingly stationary camera, while others are visible as reflections in the glass: a young woman talks on her mobile phone, while the young man hurriedly removes something from his pocket. Then a train arrives. As soon as the doors begin to part, the visual image plays in extreme slow-motion, causing the soundtrack also to transition from documentary recording to echoes recalling science fiction. Passengers disembark in slow motion, and those crowding around the doors on the platform do the same, all accompanied by an odd creaking sound. Then, as soon as the doors finally close again, the video returns to normal real-time speed. Silas Fong has been continually interested in these interstitial spaces and moments of urban life: elevators, escalators, the public stairwell, the foyer. His works suggest that our experience of these vectors of passage is modulated by subjective interpretations of time and uses of architectural space. Here, for example, the time of the journey of a public transit commuter is subjected to an analytical division into multiple compartmentalized experiences: first the interminable wait for the arrival of a train, then the negligible rush of boarding, and finally the anxiety of the ride. Fong intervenes in these perceptual states as much as he avidly documents their existence.

Leung Chi Wo, “Suck/ Blow,” 2003, 4’10″

The visual component of “Suck/ Blow” consists solely of a series of still photographs of the negative space between buildings as viewed from the busy intersections below, a medium that has more or less come to be known as the trademark visual style of Leung Chi Wo. These negative spaces are abstracted, forming geometries theoretically independent from the architectural facades that allow their existence. This video sets these images on a black background, causing them to zoom towards and then away from the position of the viewer to the accompaniment of the sound of vigorous inhaling and exhaling, respectively. Eventually, a second photographic layer is added, such that the voice of the “narrator” calls up a second urban geometry within the first by breathing even more deeply. This pair of images seems to alternate, creating a certain relationship between the different but, on some level, interchangeable urban spaces included: some images are discernibly Hong Kong, while others resemble New York. The unavoidable sexualization of the title enforces the intimacy of these public spaces, which represent not only fractured and peripheral alternative spaces, but are, in fact, almost entirely imagined territories divorced from the typical vehicular experience of the city. Ultimately, Leung is interested in the transposition of space and its effects.

Adrian Wong, “Haak Sei Wuih Tuhng Mau Jai (Triads with Kitten),” 2007, 3’02″

“Haak Sei Wuih Tuhng Mau Jai” is, at the most basic level, a recording of contemporary choreography. Set in a dirty basement room marked with stained concrete and chipped tiles, the video begins with a very frightened looking cat meowing on the floor, huddled in a tense position. Four young to middle-aged male actors appear, all bare-chested and rather heavily tattooed. The four men then proceed to perform a very obviously choreographed but forceful dance, moving the kitten around with vigor and eventually coming to blows. Although motives and goals are never clear, it is evident that the performance intends to enact a number of human relationship events through the vernacular of local gang interactions. The result is humorous above all else, although the viewer cannot help but sense the enormous energies of production that contribute to the design and execution of such a project. Adrian Wong takes on the role of an outside-insider in Hong Kong society, researching his environment with the zeal of an anthropologist and then distilling his copious observations into psychologically-effective forms of art that quote the developmental histories of both minimalism and pop art. In this case, the meaning of the dance lingers somewhere just off screen, while the sheen of artistic direction and the absurdity of the project create an intense sensation of visual pleasure.

Leung Mee Ping, “Wan Chai Vagabond,” 2007, 8’05″

“Wan Chai Vagabond” follows a single elderly man as he makes his way down a busy Wanchai street. He may be somewhat unkempt, but in reality the title of the world is the only reliable clue to his identity. Over the course of the video he walks first along one sidewalk, then across the street at a crosswalk, and finally continues along the other side. The camera stops when he stops and moves when he moves, always keeping a more or less equal distance away and occasionally allowing other pedestrians to walk between stalker and target. In several instances the man stops and starts, apparently confused or momentarily without direction. His gait is unusually slow, suggesting something of the trauma of aging, but he is nevertheless absorbed by the crowd, which splits and reforms around him. Strangely enough, no one on the street seems to pay him any mind; perhaps he is a local fixture, or perhaps the crowd simply has no energy to spare on this busy day. In a sort of conceptual symmetry, the man never faces the camera or, for that matter, turns around at all–his head remains largely bowed, only on occasion looking up to check the crossing signal. Nor do other passersby look at the camera. As a result, the piece evokes the boundaries between normal and abnormal, and in the way these multiple elements function in concert throughout the urban fabric. Indeed, it was initially part of a larger project entitled “Out of Place,” in which Leung Mee Ping followed a number of individuals wandering aimlessly through the streets of varying locales, attempting to discover new psychogeographical routes through the mapping of the purposeless.

Chilai Howard Cheng, “Doors,” 2008, 6′

“Doors” opens with an unchanging cross-section of a public housing estate building, the kind in which the doors to each unit all open in the same direction onto a large outdoor hall that also serves as a public balcony. The frame is fully occupied by seven floors, leaving a total of 42 doors (and apartment facades with a set number of windows) visible. At the outset, the scene is largely silent, with a lone figure washing a window. Slowly, other figures enter from the left or right sides, opening doors and entering apartments. All the while, the sounds of jangling keys, sliding Bostwick gates, and slamming doors are exaggerated with foley effects. Strangely, several figures enter from one side and exit directly from the other edge of the frame, not returning home at all. Beginning at this point, the viewer recognizes that this is a carefully choreographed and edited scene: doors start to open and reopen in rapid succession for sonic effect, occasionally opening in different directions and with different clicking sounds. As multiple doors begin to open and close in unison and in striking visual patterns, the audio balance drifts between left and right. The orchestra of doors then begins to vary in speed, adding in additional rhythmic elements. Then the light changes, and some figures walk across in slow motion; voices emerge, and more figures walk the screen in fast forward. The video ends with nightfall, as apartment lights also join the fray. Chilai Howard Cheng has digitally reconstructed an accidentally utopian view of communal life, a vision in which creative force triumphs over crowded living conditions.

Linda Lai, “Non-place Other Space,” 2009, 13’47″

“Non-place Other Space” collects footage of Hong Kong and Macau shot over the course of almost two decades between 1991 and 2009. Ostensibly, this non-narrative assortment of moving images attempts to define the urban characteristics of these areas: the events, feelings, and changing spatial settings are here distilled into several arcs of repeated and thematically coherent visual patterns. The video opens with a pot of boiling water on a stove, which then gives way to something like abstract patterns under a microscope, later echoed by abstract painting and blurred night-time photography. Water plays a key role in this image of two island metropolises, with a brightly colored boat, industrial maritime cranes, and a floating suckling pig carcass all figuring prominently. Other important icons include a dress hung in a tree, a human body of some kind dangled over a railing, a figure in a red dress, a vast assortment of storefronts and signs, a market, dentures, a jewelry store, a church, an airplane, glass windows, fire, and the Hong Kong skyline–concluding with a sizzling pot on the stove, as in the beginning. Throughout this rapid succession of places and emotions, the soundtrack drifts between the experimental and the operatic; the moving images are interspersed with still photographs and sentimental or poetic journal entries reproduced in text over the images, all of which becomes subject to changing color filters and varying rhythms of editing. Concluding with a note on redevelopment, this is clearly a complex rendering of an indistinct cultural territory.

Kacey Wong, “Shadow Building: City of Tomorrow,” 2007, 1’07″
Kacey Wong, “Shadow Building: World Wonder,” 2007, 1’12″

Executed with stop motion animation, these videos present themselves in sepia tone with the lines of a draftsman’s palette. In “City of Tomorrow,” a few buildings sketched on a hillside drift and and out of focus as a drum sounds slowly but repeatedly in the background. Just before ending, an unseen hand draws another stack of buildings in marker into a blurred blank space above the hillside. In “World Wonder,” a building topped with a construction crane is continuously extended by the same unseen marker, growing increasingly precarious until it seems to curl back around itself. Here, the soundtrack consists of a string instrument being struck. The overall effect of this pair of videos is nostalgic, recalling not only bygone eras through use of color and line but also willfully drawing parallels between the comfort of childhood construction projects and the idea of constructing a home–or office. Perhaps most significant is the pacing, presenting a naturalized view of a certain urban space only to quickly add on further architectural structures within the span of time it takes to beat a drum: such is the speed of development today. But the results are instable, to say the least, and end up as little more than unthinking scribbles on a preformed landscape, a situation with which the artist must maintain a certain satirical distance.

Chow Chun Fai, “Repainting: 10th Anniversary,” 2007, 1’19″

“Repainting” attempts to mimic or even improve upon the “Theme Song of the 10th Anniversary of the Establishment of the HKSAR” (or, as it is more colloquially and perhaps menacingly known, the “handover” to mainland China), something of a “patriotic” song featuring a range of local pop stars that aired on television incessantly throughout the year 2007. Chow Chun Fai has painted a still scene corresponding to each line of subtitles from the original video clip, flipping through each painting by hand in time with the music. Salient images from the song, entitled “Just Because You Are Here,” include: children in school uniforms, the Victoria Harbor skyline, the Golden Bauhinia sculpture, the Tsing Ma Bridge, an airplane, a flower, a horse race, ping pong, kung fu, the Hong Kong and mainland flags, a symphony, an opera, a fashion show, the Legislative Council, an office, a construction site, a market, and two pandas–in short, all of the robustly optimistic features of Hong Kong life presented both internally and externally as tourist marketing or propaganda. Chow Chun Fai’s rendering of the video in painterly strokes serves to deconstruct this initially unbroken narrative, allowing the viewer to focus on these individual images and their relationships to the larger political situation they have been asked to serve.

Ip Yuk-Yiu, “The Moon is Larger in Peking (Short Version),” 2004, 8′

“The Moon is Larger in Peking” begins with a conversation about the Mid-Autumn Festival and the size of the moon. The speakers are unknown, as the entire dialogue plays out in the form of white text against a black background, and it is difficult to parse the banter without any visual context. Evidently taking place in the 1930s, this conversation turns towards travel, education, and destiny. The viewer may begin to experience an odd feeling of familiarity; then, suddenly, there is an abrupt beep coinciding with a still image of a woman in old-fashioned costume that flashes across the frame before disappearing. The conversation then resumes, discussing marriage and loneliness, but, because there is no visual component, it is difficult to discern the genders of and relationships between the two speakers. As they go on to mention feelings, words, poetry, race, superstition, religion, and reincarnation, different sketches of the same woman appear and disappear several more times. The viewer is reminded at the very end that this conversation in subtitles [clarify this at the beginning? Would prefer to follow the narrative structure of the video, but your call.] is actually borrowed from the 1955 American romance film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing set in Hong Kong; the movie came under fire by some scholars for its odd racial dynamics and use of “yellowface,” making it an intriguing candidate for this anti-visual treatment.

MAP Office, “No-Stop Island,” 2009, 6’59″

The entirety of “No-Stop Island” consists of documentation of a local construction site of some kind, most notably focusing on a set of machinery that appears to be driving piles or pounding holes into the ground. The video modulates between drastically altered slow-motion footage and the feeling of a real-time documentary, at one point splitting into two frames stacked one on top of the other as if the pile driving machine were compressing itself into a new space. The shots are uniformly closeup and medium range, never allowing the viewer an overall examination of the site; instead, the progress of this single machine stands in for the industrial or architectural project as a whole. Towards the end of the video this subject splits into four screens, then multiplies even further, suggesting the proliferation of these processes. Here, however, there is none of the cold aesthetic appreciation evident in the work of Bernd and Hiller Becher, nor is there anything of the horror of scale conveyed by Edward Burtynsky. Instead, MAP Office is primarily interested in the sheer banality and repetition of such self-reproducing architectural features, analyzing the ways in which they become a part of and alter our understandings of the half-industrial, half-natural environment that produces them. The title sardonically refers to “No-Stop City,” an Archizoom project that critiqued the modernist project of utopian urbanism as one of quantity alone; here, the mechanisms of this continuous expansion are pushed to their illogical extreme.

Ban Zhang, “Sun or Star, Which One do You Like It?,” 2004, 5′

“Sun or Star, Which One do You Like It?” draws on the iconography of various Chinese national flags to question the work of media ideologies. The video opens with a zoom and pan across a digital rendering of a city, then abruptly switches to an old-fashioned film reel countdown. At zero, a mushroom cloud rises from an explosion in archival footage. After this montage, the flags of the People’s Republic of China (one large and three small stars on a red field) and the Republic of China (a white sun on a blue and red field) take center stage, alternating on a graphic of an old television as strings of binary code and the words “sun” and “star” drift across the background. An rough rendering of a male human face somewhat reminiscent of early 1990s science fiction television nods eerily, sometimes positioned between and sometimes beside those two iconic celestial bodies as it sings a rendition of the nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Finally, the floating head poses the question “yes or no” as a self-fulfilling statement. Ban Zhang leverages his identity as an artist living between Hong Kong and Taiwan, pushing the aesthetic boundaries of the political and refusing to allow the work of the image to play the role of a slave to power, attempting to reduce these loaded national symbols to their proper position.

Woo Ling Ling, “A Portrait of Self-hypnosis,” 2003, 8’59″

“A Portrait of Self-Hypnosis” opens with a textual introduction to parallel relationships with urbanism and the mother, then transfers to a more or less still city scene. At an elevation of several floors, the image fades in and out, zooming in slightly closer on a particular set of windows in one certain building with each fade. Partially translucent, almost spectral figures walk back and forth within several apartment units, appearing at some times as reflections in the glass and as other times as more solid human beings behind the windows. They move purposefully but indistinctly, occasionally passing through or past each other as lights are turned on and off. Then more text appears, this time waxing poetic on the subject of youth; when the video footage resumes, several articles of clothing begin moving of their own volition in slow motion as if they were dressing an invisible being in a school uniform. The abrasive soundtrack returns as the image of the windows from the first sequence pans across the frame; it is interrupted by the folding of the uniform shirt. A third instance of text appears, now discussing the phenomenon alienation. The camera, positioned within one of the apartments previously viewed from the outside, slowly zooms silently and steadily, moving directly forward, recalling Michael Snow’s “Wavelength.” The sounds of the street begin to dominate as the target of the zoom, a young girl in a school uniform in an apartment across the street, becomes obvious.

S.T. Choi Sai Ho, “2012,” 2008, 8’02″

“2012″ begins with a daytime image of a Hong Kong street. On the left side cars, trucks, and buses progress as usual, while the right side has been taken over by a mass pedestrian protest. The frame contains a single image, but the top and bottom sections are both out of focus, and the defined middle section displaces itself slightly into the other visual bands. The soundtrack seems slightly harsh, perhaps an amalgamation of altered voices. The video track occasionally pulses into complete clarity, then blurs again. The camera appears to pan and zoom across its field of vision, further displacing the images captured; after this scene is established, the video proceeds to flash through a cycle of still images of individual and grouped protesters, evincing a suggestion of violence through the rapid shifting of frames. A local politician and activist, Leung Kwok-hung, makes a speech that is edited according to the shifting and framing conventions already established by the video. At the same time, all manner of filters and various visual tempos are applied to images of the march itself, including a time lapse of the protesters. The audible slogans and visible banners in this later section demonstrate that the piece is derived from the annual suffrage demonstrations held 1 July in Hong Kong. Inspired by the rhetoric of the music video and electronic audio cultures, S.T. Choi Sai Ho has in this piece delivered a media anthem for a generation of politically active creative individuals.