following is the text for the final assignment. i wrote it a little longer to ‘make up’ the silence during the final critique. i just need more time.
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Perhaps They Are All Beautiful Mistakes
from YAN Wai Yin, Winnie
And this marks the end. After almost half a year of collaboration between students from Zurich (ZHdK) and Hong Kong (CityU), Reflecting Locations featured five art pieces at Connecting Space Hong Kong in early February. As the title might have spoken for itself, Reflecting Locations explores the possibility to stimulate imaginations, to reflect, and to compare upon a foreign place with regards to the participating artists’ own location. Followed by a series of remote Internet collaboration and communication between the partners, all artists would travel to another location for further discussions and on-site research before presenting their final outcomes.
Being a rather timid and absent-minded person, I, till now, cannot imagine myself being one of the participating artists. Despite the tempting travel offer, the rare overseas collaboration opportunity, and all the other fascinations and excitement about meeting other creatives in such occasion, the experience still seems frustrating somehow. What if I could not understand a thing in Zurich and become totally miserable? What if I could not stop asking and prompt to make something throughout the entire process? What if I, in any circumstances, cannot produce a work after all?
Where there’s a will, there is a way. Observing how the five works are being developed and shaped to its final presentation throughout the past two weeks of intensive in-person meetings and discussions, I found such pretty convincing. From installation, video, and photography, all collaboration works uphold their own distinctive interpretation towards exploring the known and unknown about “locations”.
Location means a place or position. How a place is shaped? How can we distinguish one place from another? City Similarities, consists of two CRT televisions stacking one another, is a dual-channel video installation collaborated by Hanz Au Lok Hang and Katarina Stephanivic. Showing various scenes from Hong Kong and Zurich, the work illustrates a direct and rigorous conversation between the two. What does the advertisement sign look like at your place? What about the roadblocks, or the teller machine?
From shooting huge infrastructures to little details in the everyday surroundings, the pair demonstrates their journey, filled with curiosity and wonder, through this series of moving images. The scene which draws attention to the back of air-conditioners is particularly standout, whereas a massive clutter of colorful memos were sticked on that conditioner from Hong Kong’, there was just a single piece of dried leaf hanging on that from Zurich, not only does this interesting comparison reflect how space is being used in corresponding location, it also suggests a brief visual summary of Hong Kong and Zurich being the city of neon signs and that of the Swiss woods.
Behind the stripped glass walls is another video installation. Joanna-Yulia Wierig’s Hong King Kong brings a cozy home setting space to the gallery for the audience to wander around her own imaginative world. Separating herself from the fictional character she created in this video work, Joanna reads aloud a diary piece from the persona alongside her own construction of space using with the video footages collected from both places. Recalling the first time when I was told about the idea of combining footages of Umbrella Revolution and that of the pop song from Rihanna, I was a bit skeptical, “It might be really risky,” I said. Handling informative and descriptive footages is never a piece of cake. Yet watching her work is something different, it is peculiar, and unspeakably intriguing. It reflects a self-indulging and enclosed parody. She deconstructs the materials collected, from her daily routines, advertisements, dramas and cartoons, to a level of superficial surfaces and clichés. She is a tourist from both places. She mocks about the existing, and creates an alienating world of her own.
What makes a journey memorable? Taking selfies at the reknown tourist spots, or enjoying exquisite cuisine in a fine dining restaurant? What about spending a moment of silence and appreciate the beauty of a rubbish bin located in one of the backstreets in Zurich? Why not? By overlaying the map of Hong Kong together on that of Zurich, Alison Hun Yun and Diana Morena Buser pinned down the positions of their favorite spots to another map and proposed an unusual method of sightseeing in a foreign place. Off the Map displays a compilation of ten video documentations of their journeys projected on the white drawing papers, which illustrates the corresponding traveling routes. Positions are twisted, so are the locations. A bar in Zurich might indicate somewhere in the middle of the sea in Hong Kong, while position of a school in Hong Kong might end up being the perfect spot to watch a classy horse and carriage ride in Zurich. I wonder if they have ever got lost while in searching for the right spot? What would they do if the pinned spots were literally unreachable? “What would be next?” I always asked, “What could be next?” Though the installation might not capture the essence of the project, the verbal presentations of the intention and process from the two artists throughout the entire program were always full of energy and surprise.
On the contrary to some light-hearted journeys presented by Alison and Morena, Jelena Pavlovic and Karen Hau Kau Lam’s Cages is unsettling. Having two LCD monitors installed slightly above the floor, the dual-channel video installation highlights the artists’ visual perception by means of comparing the architectural resemblance between the two locations. Accompanied with the audio from all the participating artists in the program about their reflection towards the opposite location, Cages infuses a sense of heaviness, and in some way, a sense of imposition by introducing extraneous audio interviews to a visually substantial collage. The audio materials are edited and fragmentary, thus, do these audio fragments still represent their owners’ personal opinions? Or, are they being transformed and become another voice evolved from this collaboration? I was constantly thinking back and forth while I viewed this piece. Sometimes I was just travelling mindlessly in different geometrical cages, sometimes I was simply listening to the interviews, sometimes I was just standing in between the two monitors, and never did I do these simultaneously.
Not having a clear end seems to be a common characteristic in all the exhibiting works. They appear to be still in progress, and have a room for further explorations, if not experimentations, to spice things up. My work, Merry-Go-Round Round and Round, Chinese Gardens is Out of Town, for example, could be extended up to three months, if not more, until I can no longer be recognized as a tourist in legal terms, or in more practical considerations, that I would have been physically drained. Throughout the process of drawing maps and asking the locals to draw me some, I realize the difference in the information drawn by me, as a tourist, and that by my friends, as a group of residents who might have spent most of their lives there. While I might be more prompted to record visually eye-catching items on the map, they, on the other hand, would also provide background information about that particular kiosk, or that specific street. I enjoyed drawing every single piece of maps, despite how painstaking it was to draw when I was extremely worn out after the day. I am also grateful for all the Swiss friends who spent their precious time and drew these maps for me, with so much sincerity and patience, during my stay in Zurich.
“I don’t know,” and “Ai-ya,” are always my catchphrases. This journey undoubtedly puts me into quite a handful of uncertainties, struggles, and dilemmas. “Don’t you think my work is stupid? What if I have never met that drunk man and received that bizarre map?” I yawped, devastatingly, at the bar one day, “Why am I in bloody place, making terrible decisions and repeating all sort of mistakes?”
“No-o-o-o-o, my friend,” she slurred and smiled.
“Don’t you think it is a perfect place to start? Perhaps they are not mistakes, they are all “Meant-to-be”s.”
Dankeschön.
