A Memory of Light
As a conceptual artist, I´m interested in the genesis of representation. We all try to figure out how we can overcome this kind of world still stand. As an outsider, I put more meticulous in my preparation to foresee as much as possible and to rebel against limitations during the corona lock down.
Working from the distance, I´m very much interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory and how individual human emotions and imagination shape our social world. This draft sketch of this installation formulates the distinction between found footage material that act as a window into the memories of Hong Kong’s identity, and intended to reflect the protesters fears and emotions without bringing them into danger.
Focusing on event in August 2019, – the Prince Edward Prince station attack in Hong Kong, stormed by the police and they were filmed beating brutally passengers and firing pepper spray inside railway carriages. The MTR closed the station during the incident, while the police refused to let medics enter afterward. Here human existence ceases collapse and police takes the lead.
The voice over comes from a young female protestor memories, I record in Hong Kong. For safety reason, I decided not to show her.
This 3 channel installation demonstrates a lively interest in the power of YouTube as a means of examining the world. It concentrates on the rich cultural heritage of Hong Kong’s cinematic scene and the pop culture with an open view, interwoven with multi-layering requires on a sensitive approach, of the current Hong Kong protest movement. While watching movies or music clips, we experience all kinds of emotions, such as fear, anger, relief, disappointment, and hope. Reflecting the consumption of action sceneries and combining the saccharine world of “Cantopop”, opening up new evocative synergies in a highly sensory and poetic manner.
Opposing the unconscious mind of injustice, a new separate visual collective of cultural visual grammar. The protagonist’s real voice adds one inner dialogue between image and matter, process and result, representation and abstraction post-modernism, and censorship.
Combining this emotional language on a visual landscape, adding the endless stream of media images on a very artificial moving meditation on history, memory, and place, helping to usher in the centrality of political injustice and theoretical questions about originality that mark one of the darkest current Hong Kong’s memory. Feelings and the emotions underline a human survivals. My intention was to try to overcome this political fainting, prevalent traditionally within Hong Kong cultural context, appearing unrelated, but offering new channels of thought. I deeply hope that this work reflects critically on implications including its relationship to public space and their rich cultural identity.
This video I Feel LIGHT, Therefore I Am DARK is infused into life and memories and rooted in the process of its creation rather than the product. Emphasises moments of lapse, where new feelings, and other physical or mental states might come into being. A thorny reminder of humankind’s place in the world, displayed as testaments to the memories, laden with hopes and darkness. As an artist I offer suggestion for how to shape a political imaginary that is more guided by hope than by fear or anger. We all need unexpected grounds for optimism about our survival and the human condition, its our future self.
