video problematizes
為了策問的錄像行動
Keywords
關鍵字
- absence, disappearance, Kowloon Walled City, enamel, squares and grids, representation of space, representational space, spatial practice, imprints and indexical relations, negative space, the well that survives, archaeology, production of space
- 不再存在, 消失, 九龍城寨, 琺瑯, 方格子和網格, 空間的再現, 表徵性的空間, 空間實踐, 印記和索引關係, 負空間, 倖存的一口井, 考古, 空間的生產
Cavity collects traces of a lost city. Once said to be having the highest residential density in the world, the Kowloon Walled City was a labyrinth of packed buildings. Demolished in the early 1990s, a park now fills its space. In an attempt to uncover signs of what remains, the artist assembles:
-a square and a grid,
-a map drawn from memory by a former resident,
-a pair of dentures, and…
-enamel – itself the material evidence of lost time and space, faintly setting off the faded city walls of absence.
The end point is a well formed video essay, but the process crossed disciplines.
“Thomas, an ex-resident of KWC drew a map of his home from memory. The first thing he drew was a circle to frame a space.” This forms the artist’s prototype for her “archaeological” dig.
“Through an array of several experiments, I collect the remnants of the past. As a result, the objects I obtained become presences that allude to the city’s absence. My artistic process was highly based on research, this includes conducting interviews with ex-residents, performative research (walking the same streets) and even historical reenactments (asking a child to learn games of the past). Through these different experiments, I was able to distil traces and objects of the walled city.”
曾經被說成是世上居住密度最高的九龍城寨，樓宇緊密建在一起形成迷宮，於上世紀九十年代清拆後成為一個公園。一個方格 、一副假牙、一張記憶地圖….；琺瑯質像流失的時空，隱隱閃襯出已消磨的城牆。
觀眾眼前的是整潔有序的錄像文章，它的構成，卻是作者多媒多範疇的考察和研究，以致不同創作媒體的實驗。
BIOGRAPHY
創作者簡介
PUN Tsz-wai is an emerging video artist and filmmaker based in Hong Kong. In the age of speed and saturation, she reflects upon the meaning of stillness. In her work, she explores the nature of the moving image, memory and the passing of time. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts and Sciences from University College London and graduated with an MFA from the School of Creative Media, the City University Hong Kong, advancing in research-based artistic creation, and adopting a more cross-media orientation to combine visual creation with performances.
潘子懷 ，2019年畢業於倫敦大學學院，主修文理本科與哲學。於 2023年畢業於香港城市大學創意媒體學院，完成藝術創作碩士課程。她的影像作品，試圖探索回憶與時間，並朝向研究主導的創作方向，探究跨媒的表述。
Keywords
關鍵字
- minority, majority, refugees, asylum seekers' community, video representation, Hitzacker Dorf, Germany
- 少數族類, 大多數, 難民, 尋求庇護者的社群, 錄像表徵, 希扎克多爾夫（德國）
“Refugees” in mainstream media are often represented as a school of moving people migrating from one place to another, or as tragic, passive help seekers who become the burden of some rich countries. Christy Khong set out to understand the actual encounters of fleeing, what it is like to leave one’s home to start a new life in an alien country. She asserts that the moment of fleeing is just one chapter of their life, and that “refugee” is a temporary status and should not be turned into a permanent identity.
Acknowledging the uniqueness of individual experience, she spent a month in Hitzacker Dorf (a village in German), in the countryside of North Germany, living with the inhabitants of the small communal village. One-third of the villagers there were refugees, another third German families, and the rest elderly; together they led an intercultural living style. The video Above the Ground focuses on Khong’s interviews with three villagers: Hamed from Afghanistan, Ismael from Mali, and Sarah from Syria, who also became her best friends. They freely chatted about their fields of interest and beliefs (top tier of the multi-layer video); whereas the heavily masked background with multiple windows is layered with found footage and news reports hinting at their backstories, especially why they fled their country.
The video, which is also Khong’s graduation thesis work, was motivated by a change she experienced in 2019 as she left her home and birthplace, Hong Kong, for the first time, at the age of 19, to spend two years in Germany for a joint double-degree with Hong Kong. She realized how she never paid attention to her privilege status as the majority in Hong Kong whereas in Germany she found herself a minority.
In Germany, she met the first African person in her life, someone from Ghana who introduced her to a community of African refugees in Germany.
Often experiencing her origin being sidelined, she was provoked to reflect on the gap between the minority and majority groups in society and the lack of dialogue between them. A sense of dislocation overwhelms someone who is a minority: the video is the evidence of her starting to ask questions.
BIOGRAPHY
創作者簡介
KHONG Wan Ying (b. 2000) is a Hong Kong-based multi-disciplinary artist whose works span across oil, traditional Chinese brush painting, photography, video, and installation art. Her works concern themes of self-reflection and healing, an invitation to audiences to connect with her personal journey. Khong graduated in 2022 with a joint double BA degree – in Creative Media from the City University of Hong Kong and in Digital Media from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. At Leuphana, she had her first solo art exhibition, "The Healing Journey," in the garden of her dormitory. Her collaborative video installation "Encounter" was exhibited at the Museum of Lüneburg in 2022. Khong is pursuing further studies in Art Therapy.
caméra stylo: the essaying camera
「電影筆」：滕文成章的攝錄器材
Keywords
關鍵字
- screen surfing, remembering, virtual walk, text messages, fragments, news from home, Google map
- 屏幕撥索, 記住, 虛擬的行走, 文字間訊, 碎片, 來自家鄉的消息, 歌谷地圖
News From Home (2022) references Chantal Akerman's News From Home (1976), to reflect on the experience of distance and communication in contemporary living.
“I made the video when I was in Europe. I recorded my walk following the Google Map as an act to recall my home city Hong Kong, where protests and demonstrations are now generally forbidden.”
The audio-visual body of the work juxtaposes a recorded route with her mother’s text messages; the fragmented elements transform the actual work into a virtual one as if we are moving through a photograph in the artist’s mind.
As Lo puts it, “what will be remembered is unknown to the present whereas people tend to imagine the past with image fragments. Video recordings make what happened to stay real or imaginable. Screen surfing has increasingly formed our daily experiences, whether we are doing a search for our needs or tracing information from the past.” This work to her is an experiment of breaking away from linear narrative flow and chronological ordering. By doing that, she hopes to isolate individual moments as a tiny archaeological fragment, as a possible “key to the future.”
錄像從來是包含過去式的，引證著記錄的行動，那管被記住的是虛構的故事還是在現實中可被影響工具拮取的眼前所見。今天我們眼球前所經驗的，愈來愈多是由眼前種種平面的屏幕所構成的。我以截圖的方式來代替「拍照」的機率也愈來愈高。截圖本身是沒有特定意義的，卻是實存，足以引發我們對這種種存活至未來的證據作出思考。如果完整性是沒有可能的話，想像和碎片或許能成為未來的鎖匙。這是為何這作品偏向把所拮取的記錄刻意打碎，再混合重整，企圖探索在文字以外，以圖像書寫歷史的可能。
《News From Home 2022》以香妲‧艾克曼 Chantal Akerman的同名作品《News From Home》為藍本，以谷歌地圖上行走在現今不可再踏上的遊行主要道路為主軸，借來Charyl Churchill 《FarAway》的文本引入對於虛擬，真實與虛構之間的疑問。穿插著母親發來的短訊截圖及其他親筆書信的碎片，這數年間於社交平台的文宣和新聞截圖，現實中城市餘下的痕跡等圖像混合剪緝而成。希望留下這數年的香港的錄像痕跡。
BIOGRAPHY
創作者簡介
LO Wan-ki, transdisciplinary artist born in Hong Kong, is interested in exploring alternative narratives for memories through image making and compositing, integrated with her creative experiences in theater, architecture and education.
盧韻淇是香港土生土長的跨媒介創作人，近年致力於尋找另類的記錄和述說記憶的方法，也結連她在劇場、建築和教學的經驗去嘗試實踐不同的可能。
Keywords
關鍵字
- automatism, surrealism, self journey, montage, collage, episodic structure, use of art, who am I?
- 不假思索法, 超現實主義, 自我的旅程, 蒙太奇, 拼貼, 情境章節的結構, 藝術的運用, 我是誰？
This experimental video explores the unconscious part of me and the hidden dynamic self, and the very process of making this work is the search journey. Surrealism and the technical affordances of the digital imaging tools constitute the work’s micro narrative methods, manifesting in the work’s collage and montage method.
Following a combination of stream-of-consciousness, automatic writing, and spontaneous recording, the artist also tuned her artistic thought process with research and collectibles, assembling a broad range of text and images and found footage, including 4 art pieces from the artist’s adolescent days and more, resulting in a chaotic mental image with misty colors alternated with black-and-white. Whereas the episodic arrangement is meant to give automatism a nonintrusive structure, sound is designed to transport the viewers through an auditory sensory experience. The four chapters roughly follow the flow from “what I have lost” to “what I am looking for,” “why I want to find it,” and “how.”
BIOGRAPHY
創作者簡介
WANG Shuxin (Yan), with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Media from the City University of Hong Kong, is now in pursuit of a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Media. Yan enjoys using text and images, found objects, and sound to do collages and montages in the context of video experimentation. She loves exploring and researching through art.
a pathway towards abstraction
具象朝向抽象
Keywords
關鍵字
- fragmented past, unsupervised machine learning, DCGAN , family photos, intimacy, image reconstruction, space & belonging, place-making, distance, personal archive, image dataset for training, abstraction of experiences, operational images, images as data, soft image, machine function as artistic process
- 支離破碎的過去, 無監督機器學習, 深度卷積生成對抗網絡, 家庭照片, 親密感, 圖像的重構, 空間與歸屬, 場所營造, 距離, 個人存庫, 機器學習用的影像集, 經驗的抽象化, 操作性的影像, 影像作為數據, 軟影像, 作為藝術過程的機器功能
An image presents a past space that is fragmented, lost to memory and in search of being constantly reconstructed. The work is reflective of past experiences abroad when the relation between space and identities became more apparent in a state of unfamiliarity and being confronted by issues of belonging. Given the current sociopolitical climate and the wave of mass migration in Hong Kong, one’s relation with space and belonging is destabilized, always questioned and reshaped.
Latent Belonging is a video composed of images generated by a DCGAN (Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks), trained on a personal archival home image set. In the realm of generative images and machine learning, concrete places and experiences are further abstracted, broken down to operational images and data to only be read by the machine. Similarly, our way of remembering is equally fragmented and incomplete which is reflected in the project’s limited training dataset, consisting of a deliberately small and unorganized number of images. Out of frustration of dealing with the ambiguous fragments of memory, the work explores machine malfunctions as artistic possibilities. The latent space of the machine is visualized and assembled to construct an unstable image in process (softimage), to present the transformative nature of place-making and the emergence of belonging.
A Limited Dataset - The dataset that the neural network trained on was built intentionally in two ways. I had chosen only images relevant to the theme of space and belonging from a personal archive. Some of the moments in the photographs were forgotten but were reconstructed .... My childhood photos taken by my parents are utilized to represent a more complete personal history of belonging as I experienced home from different distant places ...across continents...
A main idea of the project was to force machine malfunctions with a limited dataset. Therefore, the final dataset only consisted of 580 images, which was a considerably large archive for me to process, but a very small dataset for a neural network to generate accurate representations. The open and fluid definition of home in my dataset included images in different scenarios, making it difficult for them to be categorized in a humanist perspective, thus further pushing the machine to forgo generating representational images of a certain object or person.
A Limited Dataset - The dataset that the neural network trained on was built intentionally in two ways. I had chosen only images relevant to the theme of space and belonging from a personal archive. Some of the moments in the photographs were forgotten but were reconstructed .... My childhood photos taken by my parents are utilized to represent a more complete personal history of belonging as I experienced home from different distant places ...across continents...
A main idea of the project was to force machine malfunctions with a limited dataset. Therefore, the final dataset only consisted of 580 images, which was a considerably large archive for me to process, but a very small dataset for a neural network to generate accurate representations. The open and fluid definition of home in my dataset included images in different scenarios, making it difficult for them to be categorized in a humanist perspective, thus further pushing the machine to forgo generating representational images of a certain object or person.
By limiting the dataset, the neural network could only create ‘defective’ images, an abstraction of my personal memory.
ARTWORK REFERENCES:
Amy Tang: The Form of Landscape (series, 2021-2022)
Refik Anadol: Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA (2022.
David Young: Tabula Rasa (2019-present)
Colbie Fung: Nothing Less (2023, video installation)
ARTWORK REFERENCES:
Amy Tang: The Form of Landscape (series, 2021-2022)
Refik Anadol: Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA (2022.
David Young: Tabula Rasa (2019-present)
Colbie Fung: Nothing Less (2023, video installation)
BIOGRAPHY
創作者簡介
Tate Kwan graduated at the age of 22 with a BA in Creative Media from School of Creative Media at CityU of Hong Kong and a BA in Digital Media from Leuphana University in Germany in 2023. Being a Media Artist, she approaches social issues from a personal perspective, while exploring the very materiality and limit of the media she is using, embracing tools’ malfunctioning in her creative process. She works across media, from video, photography to programming, and across themes of belonging and memory as well as digital intimacy resulting from the extensive use of digital technologies in everyday life, which plays a major part in her works.
Keywords
關鍵字
- belief systems, right to question, who am I, doubts, questions, the unconscious mind, the process of questioning, What is Buddhist belief?
- 信念系統, 質疑的權利, 我是誰, 懷疑, 問題, 無意識的心靈, 提問的過程, 佛教信念是甚麼？
“What am I worshipping? Why am I so afraid to question this question? What do those phrases in the scriptures mean to me? Where could I find my place to stand?
As a Buddhist, and even if we have no specific religious affiliation, we would be asked not to question our beliefs. Am I not being pious if I had these thoughts in my mind and why am I afraid of asking? How do my religious experiences shape my personhood and the choices I have made, and make me who I am? Devoted is filled with self-reflective inquiries as I was trying to find out who I am and where I should stand.”
BIOGRAPHY
創作者簡介
Angel Kwan graduated in 2023 with a BA in Creative Media. She has always been interested in transforming her own beliefs and queries into videos via sight and sound. She focuses on the relationship between subconsciousness and reality.