It is an exploration question of Love – how long does love last? In seeking meanings of life, some people find love as the answer. German words Leben and Liebe write and pronounce so similarly and that manifests the cultural mentality of the people in equality of Life and Love. Questions followed – Does all Love end? Why and how does it end? Instead of hectic urban cityscape, this work I chose to work with a hundred years old dam built by the nature. It is a self-exploratory project. I situate myself in this magnificent monument, which has the natural feel yet highly artificial. The dam stops water flows through and over for a specific reason. A story is told in 3 perspectives and to be shown in 3 locations. First-person, third-person perspective and the omniscient narration helps to illustrate and examine floating quality of a story. The text of this work is developed from and inspired by works of others, from selected films, poetries, old anonymous postcards from flea market and antique stores, novels, interviews and most importantly Marina Abramovic’s and Ulay’s collaborative work The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk. The diversity of text attempts to exploit audience’s comprehension and interpretation to where lingually unreachable.
Exhibited in 《Inventing Dreams》 Weeds Studio, Hong Kong
2011 Video Installation 26-channel video installation on monitors
The exhibition is a video installation consisting of 26 videos, slide shows and text captions. The videos are captured by telecine super 8 film, webcam, cellphone, camera and digital video of different qualities.
With Memory Disorder, Fong investigates how the temporality of memory comes into play. In our consciousness, the images that one sees prompt an associate with images drawn from our memory. This often triggers flashbacks and even imagined events. Our minds are often a sequence of randomly connected scenes. Is there an ordering for memories? Are they organized chronologically or dependent on one’s state of mind, or an inseparable mixture of both?
By using his biography as a specimen, Fong choreographs an experience of immerging in memories and imagination by letting moving images appear and disappear. The scenes are drawn from personal encounters with conflict, the youthful urge to search for something not known, people to empathize with and places imbued with affection. According to Fong, the work is an on-going fragmented narrative that raises the question: “do we want to forget, or not?”
-Aenon Loo
Exhibited in 《Memory Disorder》 Gallery Exit, Hong Kong
2011 Web Page Approx. 10 mins depends on internet connection speed
Is there an order for memories? I wonder how they are arranged so that the scenes in our mind somehow appear randomly. Are they organised according to chronological order or according to the relevance of one’s state of mind? Cinema to me is an art of memories. Cinema works with how the images that one sees are associated with the lost and remembered images and imagined ones. It manipulates the perspective and the perception of time by the audience. In this work I try to create an experience of memories and imagination by letting moving images appear and disappear. Footage ranges from telecined super 8 film, web cam, photographs and digital video cameras at different qualities. It is displayed in a web browsing environment in multi-channels. With different internet connection speed, system of the computer and the dimension of monitor, the work can be viewed differently in the sequential arrangement and content narrated.
Exhibited in 《The Order of Things》a net video art exhibition Netfilmmakers, Copenhagen, Denmark Videotage, Hong Kong
2010 Dual-channel digital video
HDV/ Color/ No sound/ 43’
Working for a job at Hollywood Road in Hong Kong for more than a year, I often see workers taking rest from their very hard work, they are smoking, lying and chatting at some hidden places. These may be their real moment of freedom and space in their daily lifes. In search of the community in their realistic and idealistic lifes, I try to represent the spaces of these people of working class with their private space, time, characters, dialogue (monologue) and imagination.
Exhibited in
《Re-Orientation》 Former Married Police Quarter, Central, Hong Kong, 2010
as I sleep from shallow
as I see from sunset
as I hear the sound under lids
from what you found and did
The feet get wet and the hair are drunk
On the way I sweat and sunk
– Ant Ngai
Exhibited in
《Mirror Stage》Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2009
When American photographer Walker Evans trawled the New York subway taking his “subway portraits” at the end of the 30s and early 40s, he anticipated the collective anguish and alienation of the metropolis. With a hidden camera, Walker Evans would take the portraits of his unsuspected sitters, bringing the art of portraiture into the realms of life in the 20th century. In similar ways, Silas Fong adopts strategies that continue this research well into the 21st century. But as times have changed, the camera is shown in full flare, challenging the sitter to react, or to model suitably. Many things have been transformed after Warhol’s 5 minutes of fame or Guy Debord’s Culture of Spectacle, resulting in new behavioral patterns. On the other hand, life in the Big City – New York or Hong Kong – still is a fertile terrain for solitude, and as the artist puts it well: anonymity.
The place of the human being in the metropolis and the multiple possibilities of socialization have been major preoccupations for philosophers and artists akin, as 20th century meant society moved deeper into the urban landscape. Recognition of the Other and its nature has most intrigued us. Translating ourselves into the public space, where fortuitous encounters are fostered, has provided us with an ephemeral knowledge of the Other. These issues have informed Silas Fong most recent production: “Stolen times for sale”, “When the door opens” and “Surveil the strangers” are good examples of this research within his work. Digital technology, including video, web access and mobile phone, update this sociological quest. A definition of each project explains the procedures and rules that the artist has established. For “Stolen times for sale”, the artist writes: “The performer steals time from strangers through pressing the buttons of the elevators”.
In his works there is a reflection on the notion of time. The video “When the door opens” shows footage of the brief instant when the doors open at a MTR train, at the same time the artist sets the footage into slow motion, effectively “freezing” time, providing us with a contradicting measure of the rhythm of the urban web. The accelerated path in this interstitial “locus” suddenly becomes a choreographed series of beautiful movements that capture our imagination. It is in the idea of the expansion of time, where we revel, and where he delves into the nature of this time based media. As we always want to be supersized, this concept of expanded time suitably fits into our 21st century essence.
“Stolen times for sale” is another of his recent projects that deal with related issues. On this occasion there is a performative edge to the video. Although the performer is hidden behind the camera and we only witness the consequence of his action. His simple action – pressing the elevator call button – generates a sequence of reactions. We suddenly view the occupiers of the elevator peer through the open door. It also connects with this notion of relayed or expanded time, his actions originating a relational performance. In a second stage of the project, during the public showing of the video, the gallery visitors get the chance to purchase these “stolen times”. As Silas Fongs describes: “The video sequences once sold are replaced by “SOLD – XX SECONDS FOR $ XXX”. This results in the video becoming a work in progress, subject to continuous transformation, where the end would only come when all the sequences have been allocated with new “owners” of this time.
It was only natural that Silas Fong turned his eyes into the public bus system, having already explored the MTR as a ground for his work. Bus transportation invested him with a higher number of possibilities related, not only to the subjects of his videoperformances, but also to the surrounding urban landscape. His latest work, takes us into the realm of experience. The artist is not just preoccupied with the production of the images, but this time he applies the idea of circulation to his videoinstallation. Armed with a video camera inside a bus, he shot from the left side of the bus, thus filming a footage that shows us the life on the other side of the window. Passersby are invited to react to this filming as the artist reuses some of his tactics. The resulting video is exhibited in a real life size two channel projection; the visitor being sandwiched in between the two screens showing mirror like images. This idea of spatialization of video connects with the development of the genre of the installation. Sculptural qualities are linked to the moving images, enhancing the experience of the viewer, who at this stage is transformed into a visitor. Other issues, such as the representation of the real are also brought in through this strategy, adding complexity to what was originally a simple idea. Although the themes of Silas Fong’s work go back to the origins of video and its relation to experimental cinema, the way he resolves these dilemmas are only possible with the current technological and conceptual development. This is because of the way he uses space, but most importantly because of the use of a 16:9 panoramic ratio, which enhances the cinematic aspect of the work and points towards a departure from 70’s videoart.
