Author: silasfong

  • 探索藝術之道 專訪方琛宇校友

    Media. The BUddy Post, Alumni Affairs Office, Hong Kong Baptist University
    Date. 09-2017
    Text. Steven Cheung

    每當觀賞藝術品時,我們總會思考藝術是甚麼?「藝術是一種思考方法,給予藝術家和鑑賞者新的角度理解世界。」這是香港新一代藝術家方琛宇校友(視覺藝術)對藝術的定義,也正是他希望透過藝術創作表達的意念。以藝術創作為志業的方校友,其作品屢次於中外展覽中展出,獲得各方讚譽。方校友憑其獨特的創作,作品《販賣偷來的時間》先後於2008年獲得第十四屆香港獨立短片及錄像比賽(互動媒體組)金獎,及於2009年獲得香港當代藝術雙年獎的青年藝術家獎。「承蒙浸大的老師啟發了我,對我日後的創作也有深遠的影響」方校友說。

    難忘啟迪 投身藝術事業

    方校友在入讀香港浸會大學初期,修讀了助理教授蔡仞姿及副教授梁美萍博士執教的課程,從此決意開展藝術之路。「蔡仞姿老師在課程中介紹了很多她在美國學習期間知道的前衛藝術,啟發了我的創作思路。梁美萍博士執教的『當代藝術概念』課程,以例子教授藝術思想,解釋藝術家向世界表達了甚麼,而所表達的對世界構成什麼影響。那時我才明白到原來藝術是思考和觀察的方法,而這種方法是可以培養的。」

    旅歐生活 啟發創作靈感

    為進一步了解藝術世界,方校友選修不同人文學科,吸收更多藝術史的背景知識,並以本科生身份前往荷蘭交流,歐洲生活對他啟發甚深:「我有部份藝術品的主題如空間、時間、金錢、另一種生活的可能性等,也是源於這段外國的生活經驗。」他認為外國生活的經驗非常寶貴,故後來修讀碩士時特意選修德文,並赴德留學。

    方校友認為,歐洲國家的藝術氣息濃厚,當地人從小接受哲學、歷史和人文學訓練,故懂得欣賞藝術的人較多。此外,歐洲投放於藝術的資源充沛,例如德國學院會於各個藝術範疇均設有專家提供指導,專家會仔細教導各項技術。對方校友而言,這些知識終身受用,亦為其藝術發展奠定基礎。

    舉辦展覽 反思人際溝通

    方校友回港後便投身藝術創作,於2013年曾以《陌生人訪問服務》為題作展覽,備受好評,今年五月更載譽重展。方校友闡釋其創作意念:「都市生活很有趣,陌生人之間經常因為不同原因而展開對話,溝通不再以『大家互相認識,並於相同時間和相同地點對話』為前提,現代人可以利用社交網站和留言功能開展和延續討論。我希望凸顯這種特質,於是構思了這個展覽。」在展覽中,參加者可以向陌生對象以文字提問,對象以影像回覆;參加者再評論有關影像,有關回應則會以字幕方式於片中播出。

    寄語同業 為藝術共同努力

    一直全情投入藝術創作,皆因興趣所在,若能獲得賞識,更錦上添花。今年初,方校友收到一封由韓國某學院寄來的邀請函,邀請他擔任客席教授。教他驚喜的是,這次機遇竟與七年前的一場展覽有關。「我很好奇,為甚麼這位韓國教授會邀請我,他如何認識我?原來是在2010年利物浦雙年展時,他看到我展出的一段影片,並留下了深刻印象。剛巧最近學院有職位空缺,他便立即想起了我。」方校友欣然答允對方邀請,在藝術領域上作另一新嘗試。(註:刊登這段專訪時,方校友已前往韓國發展。)

    是次機遇讓方校友有更深反思:即使創作者不曾與外界溝通,觀賞者也可以讀懂作品及記於心中,多年後仍有迴響。「藝術是世界語言,不同的人看到同一作品,也可以收到相同訊息,引發思考。」對於香港的藝術發展,他坦言路不易走。雖然如此,若能裝備好自己,當機會來到,便能隨時迎接新挑戰。「我期望能夠和其他浸大藝術畢業生共同努力,在這片土地栽種出藝術之花。」

    方校友以自己作為裝置品之一。
    裝置藝術作品
    方校友的展品

    http://thebuddypost.hkbu.edu.hk/web/sep17/chi/people_wisdom.php

  • Art: A Way of Thinking Interview with Alumnus Silas Fong

    Media. The BUddy Post, Alumni Affairs Office, Hong Kong Baptist University
    Date. 09-2017
    Text. Steven Cheung

    Very often, when we look at an art piece, we may come up with a question: What is art actually? “Art is a way of thinking, facilitating us to see the world from another angle,” a definition given by alumnus Silas Fong (Visual Arts) who, through his art work, has been delivering this message to the public. The unique style of Silas’ work has not only brought him opportunities to hold exhibitions in Hong Kong and overseas, but also awards. For his work “”Stolen times for sale”, he won both the Young Artist Award at the Art Biennial Awards in 2009 and the 14th Independent Short Film and Video Award in 2008. “The compliments owe to the inspiring teaching of the professors at HKBU, which has far-reaching impact on my work,” said Silas.

    The Road to Art

    Silas recalled that during the early days at HKBU, he was already very much inspired by Assistant Professor Choi Yan-chi and Associate Professor Dr. Leung Mee-ping. “Ms. Choi has told us many things about avant-garde art which has broadened my horizons; while Dr. Leung has taught me much about concepts on contemporary art, provoking my thoughts on what art was.” Silas then realised that art was actually a way of thinking and observation, and reflected on how artists have used art to deliver their messages to the world.

    Inspirations Gained from Living Abroad

    Silas reckoned that for a better understanding of the meaning of art, he had to learn its history and know its background; and taking humanities classes could be a way. Yet, this was not enough, he thought, as increasing his exposure was equally important to develop his creativity. During the time at HKBU, he had a chance to go to the Netherlands as exchange student. After graduation, he also spent a year in Germany to further his study. “Living in Europe has brought me much inspiration. Some of the themes of my work, like ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘money’ and ‘alternative way of living’ were actually reflections of my days in Europe,” said Silas. He treasured much the experience he gained during that time.

    “Europeans value humanity and art. People learnt about philosophy, history and humanities since young and hence it is no surprise that Europeans know how to appreciate art more, when compared to Hong Kong people,” commented by Silas, “not to mention that European countries have put more resources on development of art culture. For example, the art institutes in Germany have expert in each specific art field, advising students and transferring knowledge on specific skills.”

    Exhibition Reflects Uniqueness of Work

    After returned to Hong Kong, Silas has fully devoted himself to art work. In 2013, he held his first exhibition with a theme “An Interview with Stranger” and owed to good response, the same exhibition was re-run in May this year. The success was a showcase of his creative thoughts. Silas explained the concept behind, “I observed that people nowadays might start a conversation even they do not know each other. Communication is no longer limited to people you know, or space and time, and this is obviously seen in social media platforms. This exhibition is to bring audience a new concept on communication.” Silas continued, “First, I invited participants to raise questions in writing. I then went to a stranger and videotaped his/her response to those questions. Next I would show this video to the question originator and ask him/her to give feedback which would be displayed in the same video. The final outcome of the video showed a well-communicated conversation between two strangers, though the sequence of this communication was not in the original order of time.”

    Prepare for Opportunities to Come

    Always do your best as you never know when opportunity will come. This is exactly what Silas has recently experienced. Early this year, he received a letter from a Korean professor, inviting him to be visiting professor of their Academy. Silas was very surprised that this Professor knew him. He then found out that his work exhibited in Liverpool Biennial 2010 has impressed this Professor a lot, who therefore wrote to invite Silas. “I have never thought that an exhibition held seven years ago could bring me new opportunities,” said Silas, who has delightedly accepted the offer. (Remark: Silas is already in Korea now.)

    As a concluding note, Silas said it was not easy to pursue a career in art in Hong Kong; yet, it would be important for us to always equip ourselves and get prepared for opportunities and challenges. “I hope graduates of HKBU Academy of Visual Arts could joint efforts to help cultivate the art culture in Hong Kong,” Silas grinned.

    Silas makes himself as part of the installation exhibits
    Installation exhibit
    One of Silas’ exhibits

    http://thebuddypost.hkbu.edu.hk/web/sep17/eng/people_wisdom.php

  • 在眾神失語的日子 中環星級食肆中看藝術品

    Media. 立場新聞
    Date. 2018-08-09
    Text. 曾家輝

    早幾天到了在中環都爹利街的都爹利會館(Duddell’s),是米芝蓮星級食肆,又是藝術空間,筆者是衝著剛開幕的群展「在眾神失語的日子」(The Day the Gods Stop Laughing)(展期至9月23日),也幻想著在那麼高檔的地方,學著高檔人士,吃高檔食物,度過高檔的時光。

    這次展覽由北京策展人富源策劃,在這已甚富設計感的地方展示了陳泳因(Doreen Chan)、陳沁昕(Tap Chan)、葉慧、方琛宇(Silas Fong)等四位藝術家特別為這次展覽及地方而創作的作品。

    在一個如此的星級食肆暨藝術空間看展覽,究竟是怎樣的一回事,會否好像展覽一般,連神也失語那麼富宗教、哲學及矛盾味道呢,是失語,不是無語,連神也無法理解語言內容、無力或清楚發音、錯誤配詞、命名障礙等等,真是奇怪又特別,本來神已是應該超越凡人語言的限制,但衪們也失語時,將這種想像放在這位於中環的食肆中,好像是為充滿了市場物欲,又有一種城市美學的氛圍中,增添了一絲荒謬滑稽的聯想。

    走了一圈,藝術家彷彿是在那裡的不同地方,從在樓梯、會客廳到藏書閣,製作了好幾個有故事或背景的場景——走出升降機,看到接待處,走上樓梯才到上一層的食肆及藝術空間,原來在螺旋型的樓板位置已放置了本地藝術家陳泳因的作品《他安然無恙》,以燈球、環保袋、廁紙、電線等創作成的他和她的故事,她不在了,但他如常在這裡,如常無恙;走了上去,可看到在香港及首爾居住及工作的本地藝術家方琛宇的一組作品:《老細請》、《神秘顧客》、《對白設計書》及《請慢用》,當中涉及行為表演、裝置等不同的藝術形式,從觀眾可以做出特定的動作而獲得一杯免費飲料,到伏在桌上的塑膠模型,在這空間中進行一連串的批判,批判的是在餐廳中搞展覽,到「麥難民」現象的出現;旁邊有本地藝術家陳沁昕的《糾纏》,受到Stanley Kubrick的電影所啟發,好像是在七彩繽紛的彩虹光影下,有一對如瀑布的畫;另外還有來自廣州的葉慧的《等候室》,在不同位置放了一些藍牙音箱,播出三位原型來自三件不同年代及地方的兇殺案女主人翁的聲音片段,包括美國鳳凰城的的Angela Simpson,奧地利的Gertraud Arzberger,以及香港的李鳳鳴。

    當大家走進餐廳,經過不同地方走到自己的座位,又或和朋友在示同位置閒聊談天,又或坐著吃美食的時候,看到或聽到幾位藝術家的作品,不知有甚麼感覺,不知作品當中的隱含的故事,又或那些批判、矛盾、衝突等,在這如此高度有設計感的地方,又是這星級餐廳中,不知一眾食客們是如何邊享受人生,邊被藝術品啟發呢,尤其是葉慧的作品,當食客們突然聽到一些女性的聲音片段,原來是充滿了暴力、衝突、不幸的,希望他們不會投訴啦。

    四組不同風格的作品,以不同方式介入食客的消費行為和餐廳本身的既有環境設定,筆者自己最喜歡那份衝突及批判,是在這地方舉行藝術展覽的最大價值。幻想著在那麼高檔的地方,學著高檔人士,吃高檔食物,度過高檔的時光,不知道那些人當那份衝突及批判是甚麼呢……

    筆者並非要說甚麼大道理,只是有時候看得多,有所感受而已。

  • 做行為藝術 賞免費雞尾酒

    Media. 信報財經新聞
    Date. 2018-08-09
    Text. 卡夫卡

    位於中環的都爹利會館,向來把食物與藝術融為一體。藝術品放在餐廳不同角落,老闆羅揚傑笑言,前提只要不影響食慾就可以!最新的藝術聯展《眾神失語的日子》,其中一名香港藝術家方琛宇(Silas Fong)更設計了一個遊戲,大家若參與這個「行為藝術」,更有可能獲得免費飲品一杯。

    這個「行為藝術」有多個項目可選擇,你只要「表演」其中一項,就能獲得免費飲品一杯。項目「餐單」設計得像普通餐單一樣,可選擇的表演,包括:扮自己是一個盛會的主持人,當眾敲杯,然後發表祝酒詞;另一個是你在場內哭泣,直至有人走來慰問你等等。而「最容易」的一項,卡記認為是這個——你可向餐廳內的職員講笑話,直至引到他們發笑,你就能成功得到這杯飲品。這杯飲品為雞尾酒,每天限定2杯,先到先得,價錢沒有限制。

    此外,方琛宇亦在餐廳角落安置了一組影射「麥難民」的裝置作品。現場只見一個像真人般大小的膠公仔,像十分倦怠地伏在桌面上,前面是薯條、汽水和托盤。方琛宇說,這個作品,只適合放在這間高級餐廳才收到效果,因有着對比的作用。

    的確,要過「麥難民」生活的基層市民,除了來中環的高級餐廳打工外,大概無可能在這兒消費,更遑論睡覺。即使這兒的空間較麥記更大,也更舒適。

    廢話對話

    方琛宇在這兒的第三組作品是兩本名為Small Talk的小書,隨意放在梳化座位上,大家見到就可以拿來讀,那是一本寫了多種談話內容的小書,假如你跟朋友剛好沒有話題了,裏面有廢話、不太禮貌的說話或其他用來防止dead air的對話。例如這句「What do you think about this place?」(你對這地方的想法是?)回應則為「It is very interesting」(這兒很有趣)。

    不知從何時開始,「Interesting」變得可圈可點,不想讚美但又不想表達負面意見時就說「Interesting」。廣東話亦不知從何時開始有這個用法,叫做「得意」,如果你送出一份禮物,別人回應你「幾得意喎」可能代表對方不喜歡。

    另一句設計對白是「Where are you from originally?」(你由哪裏來?意謂你的祖籍是哪裏?),回應則為「I’m from my mother’s womb」(我由母親的子宮而來),這個回應明顯就是不想回應了吧!方琛宇說,在外國這樣問別人很不禮貌,「我由哪裏來」與我們的聊天內容有何關係呢。

    此外,同場還有另一組創作來自廣州的藝術家葉慧,她目前在維也納定居。葉慧的作品常從罪案現場得到靈感。是次她透過聲音裝置呈現廣播劇,內容原型取材於三個不同時空兇殺案的「女兇手」,對話內容遍布會客廳的各個角落。

    罪案靈感

    此外,牆上有一幅攝影作品,靈感來自美國一宗兇殺案,一名黑人妓女殺了一個白人警方線人,理由是她認為他威脅到她們行業的生存。葉慧認為,社會在一些女殺男的兇案,一面倒同情女性。她覺得很奇怪,因為女性是健全的人,也是獨立的人,她們應該承擔其殺人的後果。

    展覽由即日至9月23日在都爹利會館四樓舉行。

     

    Small Talk寫了多種談話內容的,裏面有廢話、不太禮貌的對話。

    藝術家陳泳因在入口處創作了一組廉價燈具裝置迎接客人,燈具用衞生紙架支撐。

    方琛宇向傳媒講解作品背後意念。

  • 愛蝶灣6樓D室

    翁子健

    「愛蝶灣6樓D室」是方琛宇這次展覽的題目,但也是他家的地址。這個雙重性的意味在於:作為一個普通的概念,地址是功能性及指示性的,但以這個地址命名一個在科隆發生的展覽,這個地址便不再有任何實用意義,因為作為題目它不是為了讓人去尋找這個具體的地點,對於觀看這次展覽的人來說,甚至這個地點是否存在也不要緊。這種雙重性正是方琛宇創作中的核心命題:那些既是完全私密的、又同時極盡人所共知的事。

    這個地址當然也是一個提示,幫助我們去理解這個展覽:首先,它指向香港,全球金融中心,曾經的「世界工廠」的大腦,以貿易自由聞名,一個以效率和生產力作為最高評判標準的地方。這個務實的社會篤信時間就是金錢。在這兒成長的人自然而然地帶有一種道理的責任感:必須以「正確」的方式利用時間,而浪費時間就是一種反叛。從這個角度看,不妨將方琛宇的創作理解為一種對反生產力的研究,是對於那些令人罪疚和難受的不事生產的時刻之探討。他的追問是:難道我們的個人歷史不是由無數的這些「非歷史性時間」構成的嗎?這些時刻怎麼可能會毫無意義呢?

    這個地址也指向《D室》,那是這次展覽上的一件作品,2015年在香港藝術中心第一次展出。當時,方利用了展覽的一個角落,將之改造,仿製成自己家中睡房。展覽期間,他邀請觀眾每人獨自在房間內等待10分鐘,房門鎖上,任何計時工具都不得帶上。觀眾知道他將會在房中等待10分鐘,但是房間裡沒有任何值得一看的東西,他們只能把注意力放在自己的頭腦內。他們的日程計劃,他們的體驗,好比是突然被中斷了一下,儘管他們是自願參與這件事的,但是他們也不得不停下來,面對這個中斷。這就是這個作品的核心命題:這個沒有理由的中斷,這10分鐘裡的發生的事情,它意味著什麼?在未來我們還會記得它嗎?

    當下這次展覽的其他三件作品可被視為方的研究之考察素材。他以圖片及文字記錄了他在美術館實習值班時,在上課時,和在長途巴士上的心理活動。這些文字可能會有點像經典的意識流小說,尤其是卡謬的《局外人》,但是文學性不是方關心的問題。方要探討的是一種普遍的東西,而不是一些特殊的私人經驗。試想:在沉悶和分神時,我們是否都會在頭腦裡跟自己說話?我們都跟自己說了些什麼?這些話是偶然的嗎?它們為什麼會出現,為什麼會這樣出現?它們可能還會出現得毫無約束,不顧任何社會的基本禮儀和道德。與當下情境毫無關係的記憶畫面也會浮現,我們都不知道此事此地為什麼會想起這些事。方以自己的經驗,希望探討的正是這些我們自己跟自己的對話。

    在來德國兩年之前,方在香港已是一位受到認可、有相當經驗的藝術家。對他而言,來德國讀書,最重要的肯定不是獲取新的資訊和方法,而是對一個陌生環境的體驗,一種距離感和冷漠感,因為孤獨正是方最感興趣的感受之一,他的創作也往往旨在處理及轉化孤獨,以達致對自我的更深刻的理解。從這個角度看,這次展覽的最後一件作品《午後》真可謂是一個美麗的比喻:《午後》是一本沒有文字,不記載任何知識和歷史的書,書中只有陽光的映照,隨著時間轉變形式。這大概象徵了方的藝術創作之要旨:自我對於時間和心靈的最為細緻的感受。

    – 文章刊登於同名展覽場刊

  • Time, Furtive Glances and Banality: a discussion of Silas Fong’s early works

    Time, Furtive Glances and Banality: a discussion of Silas Fong’s early works

    Anthony T. K. Yung

    2010

    “Stolen Times for Sale”

    “Stolen Times for Sale” is a game of conceptual switcheroo. During the morning rush, Silas Fong pushed the hold button in the elevator of a Hong Kong high-rise apartment building. He filmed the fleeting six or seven seconds between the opening and closing of the doors. He then sold these dozens of six and seven second segments at a price determined by the number of people in the elevator, their expressions and their responses. Each segment is sold only once. The sold segment of video is replaced with a text on screen [Sold –  XX Seconds for $XX]. When sales are good, and “time” is sold out, all that remains of the work is a textual record of the length and sale price of each segment.

    This work has attracted attention in so far as it purports to not only steal a fleeting moment, but then sell it. It asserts the power to challenge the absolutism of time. However, what the artist is selling is not to time, but images. On that morning, seconds of time are stolen from the elevator passengers (the artist’s put-upon neighbors), time that should not have been lost in this way and which can never be wrested back. What has been sold is simply the image of the process of that theft, and not the time itself. The result is that those blameless few seconds now belong to no one: neither to the artist, nor to the buyer.

    At this point we have already perceived that the conceptual switcheroo involves the concepts of “time” and “image.”

    “Sale” is the work’s other central concept. Because images are reproducible, buyers and collectors of video art have been hesitant to enter the market. But in “Stolen Times for Sale,” the videos are only being sold in the name of “time.” The sale of the video makes effective use of the sense of absolute singularity that is associated with time, and is, in this way, seemingly effective at taking the measure and establishing the value of video art.

    Thus, the structure of the work is established in the following way: wildly pushing elevator buttons is a favorite mischief of children in Hong Kong, and dull moments spent waiting for and riding in elevators–time spent in impatience–are also an unavoidable experience of Hong Kong life. Silas Fong turns these authentic experiences into an artistic subject, a game of logic, and uses the conceptual obfuscation of the artwork to package apparently reasonable products.

    “Following strangers”

    People continue to advocate for privacy, and privacy protections have been enshrined into law. At the same time, we can not wait to engage in performances of the self and to violate each other’s privacy. Facebook has easily surpassed Google as the world’s most popular website. Compared to Facebook, Google is but a serious, just and trustworthy librarian! When people log into Facebook, do they sense that they have now been placed beneath an infinite series of eyes? “Friends” on Facebook are uninterruptedly connected. Friends always have friends, and these “friends of friends” fall far outside the limits of our imaginations. They can be someone who you will never meet in your life, or they can be someone who is greatly offense to you. The eyes of “friends of friends” are the eyes of the big other, the eyes of the world. Deeds and images that you might rather not have made public can be posted at any time to Facebook by people who know you (not “friends,” but people who merely “know” you). The degree to which your precious privacy has been unveiled to the world will be unknown to you, let alone within your power to stop.

    What is frightening about Facebook is that even if you do not participate, you can not avoid it. It’s primary driver is something that everyone shares in common: an objectless curiosity, a kind of voyeuristic tendency, a continually growing and insatiable desire, one that exists, in particular, in the virtual world of the internet.

    Silas Fong’s work “Following Strangers” is a self-made, web-based platform, where he gathers account information of interest to him from users of Facebook and other social media platforms, and where he cites his reason for his interest in this person, his impressions of him/her and his reason and motivation for wanting to add them.   Here, the artist is taking on the role of voyeur and surveiler/follower, and, at the same time, attempts to explore the background motivations for surveilling/pursuing/following these people. In this inverted social media platform, the focus is not on whether the photos and information from these strangers is truly interesting, but rather the disclosure of the psychic motivation of surveilling/pursuing/following strangers. For the most part, these so-called “motivations” are dull and banal, and reveal, to a greater or lesser extent, that in social media space, forming “real” relationships with strangers is beside the point, and what is most important is that when taking a furtive glance into the world of strangers, our curiosity is being continually nurtured.

    Staring, being stared at, and the disappeared starer
    The work “In some seconds” is the artist’s documentation of the roadside scenery that passes over the course of a bus route. Throughout the recording, passersby cast their curious glances towards the lens. While in “Waiting,” the artist takes surreptitious pictures of the expressions of people waiting in Times Square. The installation of “In some seconds” is highly designed: it reproduces the visual experience of riding on a bus, which has no difficulty in attracting the viewer’s formalistic interest. The latter, we can easily place the latter within the urban documentary photography tradition of Walker Evans and Helen Levitt.

    In fact, both works have developed around a topic of continuous interest for the artist. Everyday strangers appear in “In some seconds.” Their visages, expressions and gazes are videographic documentation of a transient moment in the rush of daily life. “Stolen Times for Sale” is concerned with fundamentally the same topic. “Stolen Times for Sale” forcibly interrupts people’s elevator journey to attract their gaze. When viewing, “In some seconds,” we can not be sure what it is exactly that is attracting the bystander’s gaze. Fascinatingly, when we view the work, we substitute ourselves for the subject of the staring, and imagine the self through the gazes and expressions of those strangers. In other words, other people are mirrors.

    When compared to “In some seconds,” “Waiting” is far less grand in terms of subject and skill. The people waiting at Times Square in Causeway Bay are everyday people, strangers. They are unoccupied. Because their pictures have no particular significance as social documentary, these people can function as pure aesthetic objects. And because these were taken surreptitiously, the gazer disappears, and again we walk into this paradox: is the focus of this work on the aesthetics of the object or is it the subjective feeling of pleasure produced from voyeurism? Here, Silas Fong is in the process of simplifying the form and conceptual structure of his work, attempting to utilize an exceedingly banal attitude to represent the banality of people.

    [Translated from Chinese by Jesse Robert Coffino.]

  • You Come Too

    Mixed media tucked in You Come Too, 21.1 cm x 14.5 cm x 1.8 cm, 2018
    《你也來》 書中混合媒介, 21.1 厘米 x 14.5 厘米 x 1.8 厘米, 2018

     

  • Publications

    List of Publications

    Vocabulary: Understanding Your Art Professor and Make Life Easier. Seoul, 2019, pp. 1-48.

    Small Talk: Sample Conversations for Your Perfect Date and Successful Meeting. Hong Kong, 2018, pp. 1-100.

    Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening. Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong, 2018, pp. 1-40.

    Silas Fong: Works 2008-2016. Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong, 2016, pp. 1-76.

    20 Years of Goethe Gallery. Goethe Institut Hongkong, 2016, pp. 22-23.

    POST PIXEL. Animamix Biennale. Exh. cat. Leisure and Cultural Services Department, Government of
    Hong Kong SAR, 2016, pp. 24-27.

    Timesheets. Artist book comissioned by Oil Street Art Space, Hong Kong, 2016, pp. 1-80.

    Piccoloministr. 316. Exh. cat. Goethe Institut Hongkong, Hong Kong, 2016, pp. 1-16.

    Time Test: International Video Art Research Exhibition. Exh. cat. CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, 2016, pp. 236.

    Silas Fong: Sitcom. Exh. cat. Observation Society, Guangzhou, 2012, pp. 1-16.

    Hong Kong Eye: Contemporary Hong Kong Art, Skira Editore S.p.A. , Milan, 2012.

    Move on Asia. Exh. cat. Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, 2012, pp. 62-63.

    Media Landscape, Zone East. Exh. cat. Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, 2010.

    This is Hong Kong: 15 Video Artists, Para/Site Art Space , Hong Kong, 2010.

    Work in Spreading: Images of Circulation and Retranslation, Timezone 8, Beijing, 2010.

  • Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

    FUSE Artist Residency: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
    Supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council
    at Videotage, Hong Kong
    2 Feb – 11 Mar 2018

    ‘Through slow-moving videos, images, and objects that are oft missed, Fong creates an encounter with the everyday in a controlled environment to allow the visitor to be with the urban in a different way. Many of the images are personal to Fong, and he brings in three textual perspectives (including this one) to obscure this narrative of his memories, opening them up to be shared. Bringing in media art theory into more traditional image-making practices, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening employs a light touch in a grand gesture toward a place where we can choose to be still.’

    – Excerpt from Hera Chan’s text, The Freedom To Be Still

    香港錄映太奇 FUSE 藝術家駐場: 雪夜林邊
    由香港藝術發展局資助
    2018年2月2日至3月11日

    透過在日常常被忽視的錄像、圖像及物件緩慢的移動,方氏在特定的環境內讓觀眾以日常以外的方式感受城市。作品中源用方氏私密的圖像,他引用了三個文本作為作品的切入點,混淆了對其回憶的敍述,開放予觀眾加以幻想。結合媒體藝術理論及傳統製圖方法,雪夜林邊 壯麗地輕描淡寫出選擇安穩的空間及狀態。

    – 節錄自陳思穎所寫的文章《面向安穩的自由》並由姚玠廷從英文原文翻譯

    Exhibition view

    At the entrance, visitor picks up one of the catalogues and misses out the two others which look seemingly identical. In fact, each catalogue contains a different text that guides the visitor to an alternative experience of the same exhibition.
    參觀者在展覽入口拿起其中一本場刊,錯過了貌似完全相同的另外兩本。 實際上 , 每本場刊內有不同的文本,引導觀眾在同一個展覽裏經歷不同的體驗。

    Digital print on paper, A5, 32 pages, 3 in a set, 2018
    紙上數碼打印, A5, 32 頁, 3本1組, 2018

    Dye sublimation print on voile, 140 cm x 260 cm, 2 in a set, 2018
    透明紗上熱昇華印刷, 140 米 x 260 厘米, 2件1組, 2018

    Lambda prints, table, chairs, carpet, size variable, 2018
    能達相片, 檯, 櫈, 地氈, 可變尺寸, 2018


    Digital video projection on wall, HDV, colour, 20 minutes, 2018
    牆上數碼錄像投影, 高清, 彩色, 20分鐘, 2018

    Digital photo projection on screen, 2018
    屏幕上數碼相片投影, 2018
    Digital video on TV, HDV, colour, 16 minutes, 2018
    電視機中數碼錄像, 高清, 彩色, 16分鐘, 2018


    Digital printed vinyl on plexiglass, 30 cm x 20 cm, 2018
    亞加力膠片上數碼貼紙打印, 30 厘米 x 20 厘米, 2018

    Photo & rainbow film on stainless steel, motor, 40 cm x 40 cm, 2018
    不鏽鋼片, 相片, 彩虹膜, 摩打, 40 厘米 x 40 厘米, 2018

    Mixed media tucked in You Come Too, 21.1 cm x 14.5 cm x 1.8 cm, 2018
    《 你也來》 書中混合媒介, 21.1 厘米 x 14.5 厘米 x 1.8 厘米, 2018

    Visitor participates in the exhibition according to the instructions in the Exhibition Guide.
    觀眾根據展覽場刊中的導覽的指示參與展覽.

    Printed catalogues available, please contact via info@silasfong.com

  • On Smallness in Hong Kong Art

    Text by Winnie Wong

    Published on 5 Jan 2018 in M+ Stories Podium Issue 1: Visual Culture

    How do the inhabitants of a city know when they have seen art? How do they know when they’ve lost it, forgotten it, or when it’s been returned? For all of its existence, Hong Kong has been regarded as a city hostile to high culture, and yet, since its founding as a port city in the mid-nineteenth century, its artists have been making art. Their work has not always been noticed; often it has been ignored. Even as the cultural and market value of art has grown greater and greater, art in Hong Kong has, counter-intuitively, been getting smaller and smaller, sometimes to the point of invisibility. Hong Kong’s contemporary art thus presents us with a unique dilemma: it manifests as a set of practices and sensibilities that evade celebration and sensationalism, and yet, more than anything, it yearns for recognition as a distinct cultural form. How can we recognise that which avoids being seen?

    In the context of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, the seeming absence of art in Hong Kong is all the more noticeable when contrasted with its cultural cousin Guangzhou, a city with a vaunted history of defiant creativity. And indeed, even within a shared regional milieu of a self-deprecating and casual vibe, the difference between Guangzhou’s and Hong Kong’s artistic cultures is dramatic. The Guangzhou artist Lin Yilin (born 1964) experienced this first-hand in the mid-1990s when he tried to perform the same action in the public spaces of the two cities.

    The first action took place in Guangzhou in 1995, when the city was just embarking on the massive urban transformation we know so well today. In the shadows of a tall building under construction, and over the course of several hours, Lin simply moved a wall of cinder blocks, carrying one block at a time, from one end of the wall to the other, across several lanes of oncoming traffic. A strenuous and extended act of urban intervention, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road embodied the physicality of urban construction and the relentless routine of urban flow. Trudging at cross purposes to the oncoming traffic like a makeshift, human, and transparent Tilted Arc—the infamous public art sculpture by Richard Serra (American, born 1938) that, in 1981, bluntly divided New York’s Federal Plaza and made it impossible to traverse—Lin’s work demanded a momentary but unavoidable pause in fast urbanisation and hurried everyday life.

    Months later, in early 1996, Lin had the opportunity to reperform the work in Hong Kong. This performance was entitled Drive Shaft. Lin had first hoped to move his bricks through the Hong Kong subway system, onto and off a train, from station to station. Probably knowing how unlikely it would be for the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) to permit such a disruptive action, Lin recalls that the idea was rejected by his hosts at the Hong Kong Arts Centre before permission was ever sought. As an unhappy compromise, he then proceeded to conduct the work in the pedestrian flyover near the Arts Centre in Wan Chai over the course of four days. Intending to comment on the imminent transition to mainland Chinese rule, this time Lin had handwritten on the bricks the names of various Hong Kong governmental departments. On the first day, some Hong Kong artists volunteered to join in the performance, since the wall was larger and the process therefore more demanding than the Guangzhou version. The next morning, however, Lin arrived on-site to discover that his wall of bricks had been completely altered and moved, blocking the passageway of the flyover. He assumed it was a prank or critique of some sort by those artists helping him, and returned the brick wall to its original position in order to start the performance all over. Just as he was doing that, though, a passer-by pulled out his phone and called the governmental Highways Department, which dispatched officers to clear Lin and his wall of bricks. Lin was then forced to move his bricks off the flyover and down to the street-level doors of the Arts Centre in order to continue the performance. But again there was a problem. This happened to be the period of time when many Hongkongers were queuing at the nearby Wan Chai Immigration Tower in a rush for the British quasi-passports offered to some residents. So on the last day of performance, Lin’s wall of bricks, with bricks displaying the names of Hong Kong governmental departments mixed up among them, obstructed the queue and frustrated an already anxious citizenry. The next day, Lin’s wall of bricks was finally cleared away by the Highways Department, and the performance ended as a failure. For an artist like Lin based in a city with subtle but powerful artistic interventions despite many restrictions, the event and its multiple missteps were only further evidence that art was impossible in supposedly free Hong Kong, where his action was rejected by authorities, citizens, and fellow artists alike.

    <p>A man carries two white bricks next to a row of similar stacked bricks. The bricks have Chinese characters written on them.</p>

    Lin Yilin, Drive Shaft, 1996, photo documentation of performance. Courtesy the artist.

    Lin’s ‘brick-moving’ practice fits squarely within the contemporary tradition of performance art, one that heroises lengthy duration, stalwart physicality, and provocative public engagement. That his action would be quite recognisable as such in post-Mao China as it would be in London or New York City, and yet not at all in Hong Kong, demonstrates how distinct the Hong Kong aesthetic space is from those of its immediate region, the PRD, or those cultural centres in which it seeks recognition. But concomitant with that recognition is a specific set of expectations found either in the legacy of modern socialist art, which demands largeness and grandeur, or in avant-garde critiques of capitalism, which demand transgression and provocation. Beneath neither of these ideological traditions has Hong Kong culture ever fit comfortably.

    Instead, for many decades, contemporary art in Hong Kong has been sidestepping these expectations with a decidedly different attitude: that of smallness in form, size, scale, and expression. This trend towards smallness in Hong Kong art is a phenomenon that is partially due to practical limitations determined by the minuscule spaces in which Hong Kong inhabitants live and work, and the relative lack of space, market, and support for art production and display itself. But it is also a formal trend that has developed into a broader aesthetic discourse, one we might associate with an aesthetics of ‘disappearance,’ to borrow the term used by cultural studies scholar Ackbar Abbas, or with the more global, post-1968 micropolitics described by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It may well be that the smallness of Hong Kong art is a sign of a broader refusal of the reductive geopolitics under which Hong Kong inhabitants and artists—like many around the world—operate; or it may well be a product of an emerging global aesthetics of the mediated, ephemeral, personal, and affective, in which some theorists see new forms of political energy.

    But while there are both global and local affinities with which to explain smallness in Hong Kong art, there are regional ones too. As a sensibility, it is also an inflexion of the much broader Cantonese sensibility that plays in myriad ways with understatement and self-deprecation, whether as the basis of wit in Cantonese popular language or as evident in the doubting drawl that ends the questions of everyday conversation. The most virtuosic and long-standing example of it in Hong Kong’s popular culture is the humour of Stephen Chow, whose Everyman characters model false self-aggrandising and undeserved narcissism in the most exaggerated ways. It is a sensibility of the everyday, the lowly, and the underhanded; of celebrating every good deal, regardless of how little the advantage; of cute-ifying every small gesture no matter how useless; and of the well-placed slangy remark defusing the most serious of subjects. This is not the cultural politics of the weak, but of those who refuse to grant formal power anything more than a veneer of absurdity. At its best, in other words, smallness performs the most incisive of critiques without doing much at all.

    That nonchalance of everyday Cantonese life infuses much of Hong Kong’s contemporary art, particularly that of a new generation of young artists, among whom I include Lam Tung-pang, Lee Kit, Pak Sheung Chuen, Silas Fong, and Mak Ying Tung. These artists belong to a generation born during the inauguration of the Reform Era in China (1978), and whose childhoods were spent under the final throes of British colonialism (ending in 1997). Those were the years of that surreal countdown during which a late capitalist territory prepared itself to submit to communist party rule. As artists, though, they were formed under a mainland-led Special Administrative Region government, which coincided with the emergence of Chinese contemporary art as one of the most influential forces in the global art world. Educated in the unflashy fine arts departments of Hong Kong’s university system, these artists nevertheless established their careers in the dramatically internationalised art world of the 2000s, in which Beijing had emerged overnight as a cultural centre. These have been years of historic inversions and deep contradictions.

    <p>A low table covered in toys with multiple colourful plastic stools in front of it.</p>

    Lam Tung-pangThings Happened on the Island, 2013, acrylics, charcoal, pencil, scale model, and wooden toys on plywood, 300 x 700 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

    If smallness is understood in the formal terms of size, we can observe its gradual emergence in the work of the painter Lam Tung-pang (Hong Kong, born 1978), whose art in the past ten years has pulled the viewer from the large to the minuscule. Lam paints in a variety of mixed media on plywood, and his imagery draws recognisably from both Chinese landscape painting and Hong Kong graphic design (cutesy, line based, flat, and often anthropomorphic). Even though much of his work is done on large supports, the tone is calm, the palette soothing, and the human or anthropomorphic dimension presented with a soft touch. In 2008, during a residency in Beijing, he drew in charcoal, and then partially erased, a mountain range on multiple panels of plywood, titling it Faith Moves Mountain. It is a sparse and nearly abstract work reminiscent of ink-blackened and cut woodblocks. While a large work, its surface is impressionistic and fleeting. In 2011, Lam developed that large landscape motif into a series of smaller mixed media mountainscapes dotted with skyscraper clusters roughed in pastel colours and painted on plywood panels again. This time, tiny plastic models of lonely figures and domestic objects are affixed in relief, sometimes inside small boxes, to the paintings, mixing the antique look of ink landscape with very contemporary and very unextraordinary vignettes. In those years, Lam also experimented with arranging vignettes inside his studio desk drawers, making assemblies in those small and hidden spaces as if they were preparatory sketches for his paintings. By 2013, in a multimedia work entitled Things Happened on the Island, this use of relief elements on two-dimensional work had grown into a full-blown readymade diorama of children’s toys affixed like a ledge to another very large landscape painting. The painted portion of the work, of mountainous islands manned by lonely groups of tall buildings, contrasts with the miniaturised toy cars and model roads that children are invited to play with before it. While the earlier work done in Beijing recognisably draws upon a mountain-sized reflection on mark-making and erasure, in his more recent work Lam has minimised that fairly common artistic theme with the literal foregrounding (and indeed projection) of boyish miniatures of the city. The variability of the sizes of found objects throughout Lam’s work speaks to a formal search for a scale appropriate to relate against the picturescape of mountainous landscape paintings.

    Lam once shared a Fo Tan studio with a fellow Chinese University of Hong Kong art department graduate, who would sleep late into the day in the bunk bed in the back. Slumped in their studio would often be a giant stack of what looked like nonchalantly folded bed sheets. Of course, that studio mate was the artist Lee Kit (Hong Kong, born 1978), and the ‘bed sheets’ were actually the products of his practice of painting rectangular fabric pieces end to end with mundane stripes and patterns so that they would appear at first glance to be faded household textiles. Lee had developed the practice during his master’s studies at CUHK. Notably, the patterns that Lee painted on the cloth were not referential—not replicas of specific commercial designs, nor iconic Hong Kong, nor British, nor Chinese products—so the patterns were neither nostalgic, nor historical, nor even familiar. Just faintly unremarkable. Soon after, Lee would develop this painting method into a full-blown art-life practice: when invited for exhibitions and residencies, he lived temporarily in the gallery while painting all the domestic textiles (bed sheets, pillowcases, dishrags) he would use in the course of inhabiting the space. In other words, what began as mimicry, via the painting of domestic fabric patterns, ended up dissolving into the everyday function of those textiles after all. It is a kind of performance art that is essentially invisible, turned inwards in the form-function dyad.

    <p>A table covered in a dirty blue tablecloth with bowls, a hot plate, a pot, and a tea strainer on it.</p>

    Lee Kit, Hand-painted cloth used in pantry, 2009, acrylic on fabric. Courtesy of the artist.

    Lam and Lee are hence two Hong Kong painters who have been pulled, literally, figuratively, and functionally, from traditional Western fine arts media into the genres and objects of the everyday. Yet their references are elusive and incidentally chosen—neither appropriated with purposiveness nor so radically withdrawn as to broadcast refusal. Rather, there is a certain sense of haphazardness in their use of ordinary signifiers, suggesting either a lack of will or interest to engage in, or even a tendency to avoid, the cultural politics of appropriation. That incidental inattention is moreover part and parcel of the formal appeal of their finished works, whose charm depends on the minute and imprecise wavering of the line, or the gradual fading away of dense colour into plywood surface. This mirrors the appeal of the individualised and customised craft aesthetics that are symptoms of contemporary painting’s deskilled condition. In that sense, they belong to the global rise of post-industrial craft aesthetics—a material culture celebrating the microproduction of urban recluses whose cities have stopped hosting intensive manufacturing and have found new ways to value ‘making’.

    The emergence of the artist as just one among many citizens engaged in intensely private (if sometimes creative) actions is another strand of conceptual art that would take on extra potential in the intensive urbanscape of Hong Kong, especially in the work of Pak Sheung Chuen (Fujian, born 1977). Pak’s work is squarely performative and conceptual; nearly all of it consists of private actions in urban settings that the audience accesses only through the artist’s statements or documentation. Pak developed this particular practice by way of a highly unconventional gig: two years of producing a weekly double spread in the popular Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao. Pak was invited by then-editor Helen Lai, who gave him free rein to reflect upon current events in Hong Kong on a regular basis. Many of the themes he was assigned were obviously political, but Pak chose to diffuse the oppositional nature of the politics with ‘alternative perspectives’ by literally altering the perspective: for example, photographing a protest from an unexpected angle to include daily life passing by.

    Pak’s work for Ming Pao is unprecedented in the history of contemporary art for its regularised and extended use of the newspaper column as form, structure, and display. For two full years, Pak was paid as a weekly columnist and assigned ‘stories’ as any columnist might be. He then had to supply a topical work, in the form of laid-out and accessible texts and images, in a matter of days. As with any columnist’s work, the newspaper would receive letters from readers in response to Pak’s spread, and his practice became imbricated in a weekly dialogue between his self-reporting documentation and the newspaper-reading public’s reaction. Pak’s work was hence neither a parodic artist-produced ‘newspaper’ that mocked the structures of mass media (such as those produced by the Situationists and the Surrealists) nor a temporary ad paid for by an artist to make a public artist’s statement in the conceptualist mode. Instead, Pak and his editor created an alternate venue for the display of art without any anxiety over being co-opted by existing power structures. Rather, Pak proudly described his practice as putting him in a position not unlike that of any other person in Hong Kong without an office job: unable to stay in a small home all day, wandering the city, and seeking a safely mediated dialogue with his fellow citizens. Eventually, paying attention to aspects of public space ultimately led him to ruminate on the meaning of citizenship and normalised life in the city. Pak then proceeded to make extremely minute, subtle, and temporary interventions in that space, or at least to take as his material the small interstices between public space and private thought where something might be done.

    <p>Four images side by side. Three of the images show people standing and walking through a subway station. The fourth shows two men smiling at the camera.</p>

    Pak Sheung ChuenWaiting for a Friend, 2006, performance, Kowloon Tong MTR Station, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist.

    One newspaper work that speaks particularly to the urban condition of Hong Kong is Waiting for a Friend (Without Appointment) (2006). In this work, Pak stands in the crowded Kowloon Tong subway station—one of the largest transportation nodes of the city, where finding a space to stand is already a challenge. There he waited for almost four hours before someone he knew happened to walk by. The friend said, ‘How did you know I’d be here?’ And Pak responded, ‘I actually didn’t know, but I’ve been expecting you here for a long time!’

    It is a beautiful exchange, not only for its brevity but also for its tiny insertion of just slightly counter-normative behaviour into a scene of Hong Kong’s permanent rush hour. Of course, that insertion itself is only a momentary disruption of the urban flow and the temporal horizons of waiting, expectation, and chance. One imagines the two friends, with only a couple of remarks exchanged, returning to the sea of motion of the city’s subway. It is an action feasible as ‘art’ perhaps only in a place like hyper-rationalised Hong Kong, where most residents would likely be able to wait for a friend without an appointment at any of its main subway interchanges. In other cities, a person might have to stand far longer for such an event to take place, while in yet others, meeting a friend without an appointment would not be remarkable at all. There is always a sort of existential weight to ‘waiting’ in a modernist context, but unlike the Kafka character who waits all his life only to face the same immovable bureaucracy, or the Hongkongers waiting for their passports while Lin continually recreated his wall of bricks, Pak’s action unwinds the significance of waiting through the very short period he actually had to do it, and through the charm and pleasure of seeing, at the end of it, a friend.

    In the efficient flow of a Hong Kong day, even a few seconds of delay are pregnant with meaning, at least as depicted by Silas Fong’s Stolen Times for Sale (2008). Fong (Hong Kong, born 1985) is also a graduate of CUHK’s MFA programme, and his Stolen Time for Sale is a video work that documents the brief seconds he ‘steals’ from strangers in a high-rise residential tower when he presses the lift button for no reason except to record their reactions when the doors open. The effect of this microdisruption is sometimes captured in the passengers’ expressions: mostly they are unperturbed, annoyed, bored, or puzzled, and every now and then someone directly confronts the camera with an aggressive stance. Each is a wonderful moment of reveal, when the mirrored doors part and we get a glimpse of who is in the lift and what their reaction is. Fong then ‘sells’ cuts of the documentary to gallery goers, re-editing the video in its next run and replacing the sold footage with blank spaces and a caption noting the sale price. The briefest of visibilities in the tiniest of spaces is thus ultimately rendered invisible again, and presumably at the conclusion of all ‘sales’, the work will be only an erased sequence of black screens with prices exchanged for seconds.

    <p>Multiple images showing different iterations of people standing in an elevator. Each image has an item code, quantity, production date, time, and price written underneath.</p>

    Silas Fong, catalogue for Stolen Times for Sale, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

    Taking up a little time and doing something that looks like work—and yet is not a job—all in order to question ordinary use values is powerfully enacted in Mak Ying Tung’s (Hong Kong, born 1989) Sterilization (2013). In this work, the artist ‘sterilises’ strawberries by removing their achenes (‘seeds’) with a toothpick. The practice is related to her Disarming (2013), in which she removes the prickles from a tiny cactus with a pair of tweezers. Sterilization has been executed, performed, and installed with variations several times, and it is documented in different videos. In the video versions, only two hands are shown, determinedly at work with a toothpick on a single strawberry over a clear Petri dish. The action seems at first clinical and also cosmetic, the bright red of the strawberry head impossible not to anthropomorphise—since strawberries are often related in Hong Kong skincare commercials to noses with blackheads that need to be extracted, and in Taiwan to the millennial generation. The hands pick at, dig, rub, and poke each tiny seed of the strawberry. By the end the fingers are dripping with red liquid and the cute strawberry is reduced to a horribly unrecognisable pulp. The titular action, of course, makes clear the extent to which beauty and cleanliness are embedded in the procedures of biological and social reproduction. The coercive processes of reproductive control are dramatised in the gathering terror of tiny, individual, one-after-the-other pinpricks.

    A video of two hands sticking out of holes in the wall picking the seeds of a strawberry with a toothpick.

    Mak Ying TungSterilization, 2013, video.

    Although so much of the history of performance art mythicises duration and obsessive repetition, and although all of the above works by Hong Kong artists utilise duration and repetition in some respect, upon closer inspection, few of these works, in fact, take very long, or have really grown into an extended long-term practice. Pak Sheung Chuen waiting ‘for a long time’ was but fewer than four hours. Silas Fong’s disruption of his neighbours’ lift time was measured in seconds. Mak Ying Tung and Lee Kit both repeat their actions, yet neither requires an arduous physicality nor demands of the viewer any relational (let alone difficult) experience. While Lam Tung-pang works at a larger scale and sometimes invites participation, that invitation is made, literally, with toys.

    Overall, none of these works takes actual risks with property, legal codes, or power structures, and indeed, works like Fong’s stolen seconds and Pak’s newspaper spreads for Ming Pao mesh seamlessly with the expectations of commercial art and mass media systems. While often taking place in the public space or the everyday, they never obstruct it. Finally, though self-consciously operating as such, these Hong Kong artists often don’t announce themselves as interveners in the city, the home, or the art world. It is in these senses that their sensibilities are so remarkably different from the legacies of conceptual and performance art, the grand politics of modernist or socialist art, and even the contemporary performance art of Guangzhou.

    And yet, it would be too easy to dismiss these departures as symptoms of a new generation’s capitulation to depoliticised or commercialised microaesthetics. For these young artists work in a time and place when transgression and grandeur have already been usurped by large, geopolitical, and even universalist conceptions of power struggle. Under such conditions, the small, the invisible, and the brief invoke an aesthetics of microartistic production while rendering the problematics of power separately from those of visibility. They instead propose a means of reflecting and contemplating scale with neither contest nor critique. Here the process of denaturing, becoming, deferral, and delay takes place as a search for the appropriate scale—and space—of an unintrusive voice.


    Image at top: Lin Yilin, Drive Shaft, 1996, photo documentation of performance, M+, Hong Kong. Gift of Guan Yi, 2013.

    Winnie Wong, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other challenges to authorship and originality. Her research is based in the southern Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Her writing engages with Chinese and Western aesthetics, anthropology, intellectual property law, and popular culture. Her book, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press 2014), was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2015.