Non-place ▪ Other Space: the sight-and-sound archive of untold anecdotes for Hong Kong and Macao

[*This article was prepared for ‘urban style; build up a (un)fair world’, Afro-Asian Institute Graz, Austria, June 7, 2011, as well as for the inaugural edition of the Open City London Documentary Festival at the University College of London, June 16-19, 2011 -- as a result of my reflection on this work after its appearance in International Competition at the 57the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 5-11, 2011.]

Videography as personal diaries, visual ethnography and historiography

Over the years, I have developed a method to create video works that are based on found-footage or video diaries in my own archive. Collecting sights and sounds in a certain existential mindset, and gaining fresh understanding of these documents much later like a researcher, form the rudiments of my experimental documentary position which maps a double “I” at work. My collecting activities are highly intuitive, much like Surrealist automatism, and yet inevitably shaped by my education and life experiences, whereas the formation of image/sound discourses from video fragments is an important process of discovery and critical intervention. And this is also whether my historiographic intention comes in.

Most of my creative works have a visual, auto-ethnographic dimension: through personal visual diaries I observe culture and history as concrete lived experiences and entrenched moments of the everyday. In terms of cinematic art, my works follow closely thoughts in the history of experimental cinema in the US and Europe, asking as well what experimentation possibly means in my cultural context. I’m particularly interested in Early Cinema moments – when cinema’s possibilities were wide open, and before cinematic narrative conventions were formalized. To me, the energies of Early Cinema bear an ethical dimension: the imperative to keep an artistic medium open and alive.

My critical and creative works in general have a strong concern for language and micro/meta-narrativity, grounded in a feminist sensibility that integrates critical theory, cultural studies and historiography. Language to me includes film language and visuality at work in general as expressive systems.

Non-place ▪ Other Space as experimental, critical visual-ethnography

Non-place ▪ Other Space is part of my continuous fuelled interest in found footage and compilation works, also an auto-ethnographic practice. I have been a fervent walker of the city as well as a detached collector of sights and sounds. Video-making then is to renew the old images that filled my archive, also to preserve the fragments for their own autonomy and openness for signification. In Walter Benjamin’s light, “the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”

Non-place ▪ Other Space is also self-consciously engaged in the dialectics of the monumental and the fabric of everyday life in the context of Hong Kong and Macao, two cities whose histories and identities have been co-opted into the grand discourse of Chinese civilization since their handover to Chinese sovereignty.

Non-place ▪ Other Space compiles fragments of the city space in Hong Kong and Macao (1991-2008) to assert the possibility of many spaces and temporal sheets in one single framed discourse. It attempts the states between disappearing and emerging, visible and concealed. “Walking through” is a precarious experience. One penetrates, dives into, emerges and immerses in… In one moment, I see, therefore the video camera records for me; in another moment, the camera sees and retains, then I discover. Automatism leads. Virtual sounds I barely grasp in my mind, and fragments of a voice I have long forgotten, all blended into the placeless other space of non-place. Places and lived moments of disappearance return as the in-between, neither monumental, nor illusionary.

I have discovered much about my ethnographic impulses as I piece together fragments of sights and sounds. Hong Kong is a food-oriented culture; yet to me food is closely tied to death and demise. I meant to be anti-monumental, and looked for ‘history’ in the banal and the everyday. Yet as I review the finished piece, every other minute of the work carries fluttering fragments of a monumental event: Chinese New Year, the Ghost Festival, the 2000 Millennium celebration, China’s hosting the Olympics… Most of the outdoor sites in this work no long exist in current maps of Hong Kong and Macau as a result of ceaseless urban renewal projects; or some scenes have never yet existed as practical, concrete dwellings as they were only impermanent sites of art installations.

Montage as critical strategy

Globally circulated typical images of Hong Kong glorify the soaring skyscrapers of the city’s financial and multi-national corporate institutions, or else the skyline of the Victoria Harbor, crowds and traffic jams. To me, Hong Kong cannot be reduced to a handful of images, whereas it is in the act of walking that I discover my metaphor – ceaseless streams and torrents of sensations from eclectic and multifarious sources, sounding or muffled, colliding yet blending. Here and there, huge digital screens scream at crossroads as I sink into the boundless space of my thought world or sudden daydreams. Then at the quick turn of a street corner, a bustling road becomes a forgotten alley carrying on the life of half a century ago. Walking through the city space of Hong Kong to me is real-time experience of rapid succession of details sweeping by and ceaseless transition in and out of broken time zones. In the language of cinema, we call it ‘montage’. More importantly, as my visual research shows, the city of Hong Kong has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity – in the context of a real estate-driven development model.

In working through chaos and disorder, and in piecing together fragments of sights and sounds into an image discourse, I was drawn into a renewed interest in the meaning of editing. Montage is collage. Collage, with its historically subversive connotation, leads me to a method that achieves coherence via incoherence and incongruence. Thus I call my visual grammar that of fragments: an editing approach that liberates individual shots from discourse, and allows each image/sound fragment to take on new tones and voices as it freely cohere with each other.

The sight and sound fragments are pregnant with anecdotal resonance as yet to be made explicit. I’d like to use the pastry ‘napoleon’ (‘thousand-leaf, or millefoglie, or mille-feuille) as an analogy to describe the overall image/sound system resulting from the montage of fragments of varied texture and sensibility in Non-place. The many ‘leafs’ include: art space and art installation, food, small details of monumental moments, water (nature in the urban space), places where food is prepared, disgust (waste, relics, food), demolished place, human body parts, casual conversations, media broadcast, my mother…

Yet one final ‘leaf’ is my diary in the form of poetry. In the midst of the torrents of images and sound signals one finds the subject being of the artist, whose own private story and her relation with her tools could only be articulated in words. Text-image relation in this work is therefore not that of interpretation or supportive elaboration. The written words are not translatable into any visual form; they form an autonomous tier of space of their own, the private, desirous, and reflexive of art-making.

The untold anecdotes of disappearing places...

Non-place ▪ Other Space is an archive of visual quotations of vanished places whose stories beg to be told. Here are three instances:

- Portions of the harbor shore of Hong Kong that now become land from sea-filling... Despite the lacking in leisure space for the dense population of Hong Kong (now over 8 million), the Hongkong Government, until recently, had seldom considered the natural harbor shores of Hong Kong for providing a nice walk for its citizens. Heavy sea filling along the shore never ceased to make way for highways. Preventing the harbor of Hong Kong from disappearing due to over land-reclamation has been the main agenda of a local activist group called ‘Friends of the Harbour’. [The stories that need to be told: the history of Hong Kong’s harbor shore]
- Images of the Walled City, with workshops for food manufacturing, supplies for dental treatment, and inexpensive housing, a community that the Hong Kong Government cleaned up totally by 1993, now turned into a memorial park... [The stories to be told: elimination of communal life for urban renewal]
- Images of a charity home originally for domestic helpers who had sworn celibacy, the poor and women in need during the Japanese occupation (1940s): in the early 2000s, the Macao government loaned the space to independent art groups to stage alternative arts. After a few incidents of art censorship, the government decided to take back the space to develop it for cultural tourism in the name of cultural heritage preservation. Now on the same site, among the many tourists’ interest points is an atmospheric restaurant heavily publicized in all tourist guide books… [The stories that need to be told: top-down engineered cultural management for tourism, at the cost of forfeiting the nourishment of independent art-making]

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