Issue Editors: Peter Benz, Huaxin Wei & Justin Chiu-Tat Wong
ISBN: 978-94-92852-63-2
Editorial
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We called the global creative community for contributions by summer 2020 in an attempt to map practices for generating and sharing alternative knowledges across a variety of creative methods and forms.
Our call accepts that there may be an infinite number of equally valid, but possibly less accessible – or merely accessible by certain communities – knowledge systems, much like concurrent physics is considering the existence of a multiverse of parallel universes. If this were indeed our view, then obviously it would be a futile...
Articles
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This text is an artistic companion to the accompanying collages where complexity, ambiguity, emergence, and abstraction are emphasised. Through artistic practice I investigate the primacy of objects and their relations. Consistent with Barad’s Agential Realism, objects are constructed through their relations. This conflicts with a capitalist and colonialist view where objects pre-exist relations and are that which can be extracted, used and/or consumed. The images herein are composed from fragments of photographs taken at a particle accelerator facility where fragment boundaries are...
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My work investigates our complex cultural relationship with Nature with a capital "N", in particular the fantasy of tropical space: a collage of impressions and desires which ossify into a psychological 'elsewhere' that is in fact no place at all. By making images that simultaneously trigger and violate romantic tropes, I attempt to reverse the gaze of the tourist back onto itself. This essay describes the process by which I became a tropical tourist at the age of six, the year that I found my father’s heart-attacked body on our kitchen floor. This early experience of mortality, coupled...
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Olivia Chen has conducted research into the transient dawn markets of Hong Kong in which hawkers secretly operate second-hand markets, forming a liminal space in which objects of inconsequential value are sold and exchanged. Through this Chen has built an understanding of the web of the social relations and hierarchies that underpin poorer areas in Hong Kong, exposing the socio-economic disparities in Bulkeley Street, Hung Hom and giving the lie to the prosperous facade of Hong Kong. The reality that she captures is a vanishing one, with street markets giving way to shopping malls....
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Collect. Connect. I was intrigued by the correspondence between these two words, when I, primarily as a creative writer, started my residency at the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong, where I was invited to focus on AAA’s Ha Bik Chuen Archive (H.B.C Archive). Ha (1925–2009) was a well-known artist, a fervent collector of exhibition catalogues, documentations, and the photographs he took at these exhibitions, among other things. Visiting the HBC Archive and his old home, I started to think of Mrs. Ha, of the impossibility of a collection without connection. We collectively remember; we...
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Light makes our surroundings visible to us. Vision plays a substantial role in how we access our environment and make sense of it. Yet, the understanding of light vision suffers from the discrepancy between physical and perceptual facts. This contribution questions the rationale of how knowledge and truth are generated. Language may often not be adequate to activate and guide all of our senses whereas artworks, especially light art, may evoke thoughts and demonstrate experiences (of perceptual processes) that open up reflective attitudes on reality’s subjectiveness. In this essay, the...
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SloMoVo is mostly inaudible voice/grunts/hums triggering synths generated in real-time. It is throat synthing: making silence into sound. Each word makes a mountain. Each breath begins a tide. SloMoVo asks: how do tiny seemingly inconsequential gestures of our lives reverberate through networks? How potent is the seemingly impotent unheard voice when augmented with tech? What effect does the unheard or repressed or invisible have on the resonance of the universe? Is network technology and media software capable of expanding identity? What is the resonant frequency of society?
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Lucas Kwok’s Fifth Region is a speculative spatial narrative. Positing a new region in the air above Hong Kong in 2060, as the city below has become too crowded to live in. At a time when previously scripted futures of this city are currently being hastily re-written, Fifth Region presents an allegorical parable, a critique of overpopulation, density and government control of land, as well as an imaginary vision of a utopia escaping the city below. Kwok’s project works on two scales: the first reveals the megastructures of the Fifth Region that tower over the city below, the second...
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An investigation into illustrations of philosophical texts conducted by artist Barbara Ellmerer and graphic designer Vera Kaspar, two artists who documented their enquiries with ‘image protocols’. These protocols, in turn, led to a re-evaluation of the materials and means used in the process of artistic perception and production. This process remains structurally resistant to verbalisation but relies on individual calibrations between the perception of a given image and the means and materialities at the artist’s disposal (colours, brushes, paper, but also photography, scanning,...
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Operating from the position of an artist with a mature practice in creating public art, this essay chronicles and contextualises the development of a series of works that consider the history, symbolism, interpretation, and evolving understanding of specific historic public artworks. There is a paradox in my development as a muralist: my significant experience while being affiliated with and working on behalf of a prominent community-based non-profit arts organization, where I repeatedly faced constraints upon the content and attitude of the work being created, earned me the notoriety...
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Hong Kong has a history punctuated by waves of immigrants and influxes of expats, especially during years of wars, famine, and drastic social changes. The wide wealth gap among different classes contributes to the diverse cityscapes within walking distance of one another. Street photography in the international and multicultural metropolis has continued to fascinate photographers – some sojourning and others rooting. With two sets of photos – from British traveller Nick Howard and Hong Kong native Phil M.F. Shek – laid side by side, this essay questions the meanings generated through the...
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Teach a robot to pull a weed. What sounds like a straightforward task comprises an intricate set of actions and complicated ideas of nature. Translating a culturally-defined, ambiguous object (‘a weed’) into successful machine code directions requires human-machine negotiation and reveals emerging nature-technology relationships. The field guide provided here contains instructions for a Taurus dexterous robot, commonly employed in tele-surgery and roadside bomb diffusion. The soybean plant, also addressed in the code and images, is an intentional choice based on the combination of...
Abstract
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As an unforeseen pandemic disturbs our livelihoods and forces us to change our boundaries, small talks arise and disperse in fleeting moments within and beyond physical perimeters. The notion of singular truth (metanarrative : Lyotard 1984) has evidently been overridden in this time. Small stories (Bamberg 2004, 2006; Georgakopoulou 2006; 2007) are heavily embedded as part of the trajectory of social interactions. As fragments of talk-in-interactions, they are recontextualised and reaffirmed as narratives along multiple threads of conversations across time. Presented in this article is a...