The (Im)possibility of Art Archives: Theories and Experience in/from Asia (2024) Tree of Malevolence (2024) The [Im]possibility of Art Archives: Theory and Experience in/from Asia (2023) Publication: The [Im]possibility of Art Archives: Theory and Experience in/from Asia (2023) The Phantom Archives As Below, So Above (2023) Publication: No Misery (2022) The Cold Mountain (2022-) The Cold Mountain - film (2022- ongoing) stepbackforward.art (2021-) A Meeting Man (2014) Archive of the People (2013-14) Can't Live With or Without You (2018) Can’t Live With or Without You (2018) For Whom the Bell Tolls (2017) archiveme.art website The Coffee has Faded, because the Ice has Melted  (2019) The Coffee has Faded, because the Ice has Melted  (2019) Publication: Sea Sand Home Publication: "Sea Sand Home" Timeline Sea Sand Home (2021) TV Commercials and Video Tutorials (2018) Dancing with 50 Cents Party (2018) A Guide to Archive Me (2018) Publication: "Artist Archives Kit" Publication: "Busy Hands" Busy Hands (2019) Busy Hands (2019) The Library will Endure (2016) I Confess I didn't (2016) We Hold Empty Names (2016) I Thought We Talked It Through (2016) The Copies (2016) So Many Quiet Walks to Take (2016) From 1 to 5307 (2017) Catalogue of Catalogue (2017) Casting Bidders (2017) The Order of Things (2017) HMS Tamar (2014) The Port (2014) The Hikers (2014) The Movies (2015) The Commodity (2015) The Anonymous (2013-15) The Stalker (2013) The DJ (2013) The Pen Pals (2013) Shoulder Number (2013) The Table (2013) Dates and Nights (2014) Publication: "Can't Live Without" Can't Live Without(2017) Publication: "Things will Work Out Tomorrow- A Growing Collection of StepBackForward Methodologies" They were There (no.1) (2020) They were There (no.2) (2020) They were There (2019-20) Archive of the People (2013-14) The Phantom Archives (2021-) stepbackforward.art (2020-) The History of United Front (2013-) The History of Riots (2013-) A Performative Reading by "the Six" (2020) Publication: "OUTCAST" Publication: "I could not recall how I got here" Part VII: Outcast (2020) Prelude (2020) Part VIII: The Dust (2020) Part VI: The Containers (2019-20) Part V: The Remains of the Night (2020) Part IV: The Digger (2019) Part III: The Enka Singer (2019) Part II: The Smoking Lady (2019) Part I: George and the Swimming Pool(2019) The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament: prints (2019) The Memorial (2019) Made in Occupied Japan (2018-2020) I Could Not Recall How I Got Here (2019) The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament - single-channel video (2018) The Relentless Voyage (2020) The Shadow Lands Yonder (2022) Can't Live Without (2017) Sea Sand Home (2020-) Theatre Exile (2020-) The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20) The Infinite Train (2020-) The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament: Bronze sculptures (2018-19) The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-20)

Displacement

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of consecutive projects under the theme of Displacement– based on the understanding of human migration and material flow in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power, the projects scrutinise the agency of Displacement, expand the perception of the notion to affective, anachronic, transgenerational and geopolitical aspects of human conditions entangled in Eurasian problematics. The first in the series, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) examines the material and ideological transition of public statues in Hong Kong; the second, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20), scrutinises the refuge in Hong Kong and Guangdong during the Japanese occupation period, the displaced was later involved in bacteriological experiments. The third: Theatre Exile (2020-) re-articulates the notion of diaspora through the Jewish refuge and its multifaceted political struggle among international powers in Shanghai, China during WWII; the fourth: The Infinite Train (2021-) explores the coloniality of Manchuria addressing the affects of displacement on transgenerational human experience; the fifth: to be confirmed; the final: Sea Sand Home (2020-2030) studies the public policy of Hong Kong on land development and Hong Kong-China integration.

The research materials of this series were published in the public online archive – The Phantom Archives in late 2022.

Displacement

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of consecutive projects under the theme of Displacement– based on the understanding of human migration and material flow in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power, the projects scrutinise the agency of Displacement, expand the perception of the notion to affective, anachronic, transgenerational and geopolitical aspects of human conditions entangled in Eurasian problematics. The first in the series, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) examines the material and ideological transition of public statues in Hong Kong; the second, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20), scrutinises the refuge in Hong Kong and Guangdong during the Japanese occupation period, the displaced was later involved in bacteriological experiments. The third: Theatre Exile (2020-) re-articulates the notion of diaspora through the Jewish refuge and its multifaceted political struggle among international powers in Shanghai, China during WWII; the fourth: The Infinite Train (2021-) explores the coloniality of Manchuria addressing the affects of displacement on transgenerational human experience; the fifth: to be confirmed; the final: Sea Sand Home (2020-2030) studies the public policy of Hong Kong on land development and Hong Kong-China integration.

The research materials of this series were published in the public online archive – The Phantom Archives in late 2022.

Displacement

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of consecutive projects under the theme of Displacement– based on the understanding of human migration and material flow in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power, the projects scrutinise the agency of Displacement, expand the perception of the notion to affective, anachronic, transgenerational and geopolitical aspects of human conditions entangled in Eurasian problematics. The first in the series, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) examines the material and ideological transition of public statues in Hong Kong; the second, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20), scrutinises the refuge in Hong Kong and Guangdong during the Japanese occupation period, the displaced was later involved in bacteriological experiments. The third: Theatre Exile (2020-) re-articulates the notion of diaspora through the Jewish refuge and its multifaceted political struggle among international powers in Shanghai, China during WWII; the fourth: The Infinite Train (2021-) explores the coloniality of Manchuria addressing the affects of displacement on transgenerational human experience; the fifth: to be confirmed; the final: Sea Sand Home (2020-2030) studies the public policy of Hong Kong on land development and Hong Kong-China integration.

The research materials of this series were published in the public online archive – The Phantom Archives in late 2022.

Displacement

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of consecutive projects under the theme of Displacement– based on the understanding of human migration and material flow in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power, the projects scrutinise the agency of Displacement, expand the perception of the notion to affective, anachronic, transgenerational and geopolitical aspects of human conditions entangled in Eurasian problematics. The first in the series, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) examines the material and ideological transition of public statues in Hong Kong; the second, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20), scrutinises the refuge in Hong Kong and Guangdong during the Japanese occupation period, the displaced was later involved in bacteriological experiments. The third: Theatre Exile (2020-) re-articulates the notion of diaspora through the Jewish refuge and its multifaceted political struggle among international powers in Shanghai, China during WWII; the fourth: The Infinite Train (2021-) explores the coloniality of Manchuria addressing the affects of displacement on transgenerational human experience; the fifth: to be confirmed; the final: Sea Sand Home (2020-2030) studies the public policy of Hong Kong on land development and Hong Kong-China integration.

The research materials of this series were published in the public online archive – The Phantom Archives in late 2022.

Displacement

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of consecutive projects under the theme of Displacement– based on the understanding of human migration and material flow in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power, the projects scrutinise the agency of Displacement, expand the perception of the notion to affective, anachronic, transgenerational and geopolitical aspects of human conditions entangled in Eurasian problematics. The first in the series, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) examines the material and ideological transition of public statues in Hong Kong; the second, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20), scrutinises the refuge in Hong Kong and Guangdong during the Japanese occupation period, the displaced was later involved in bacteriological experiments. The third: Theatre Exile (2020-) re-articulates the notion of diaspora through the Jewish refuge and its multifaceted political struggle among international powers in Shanghai, China during WWII; the fourth: The Infinite Train (2021-) explores the coloniality of Manchuria addressing the affects of displacement on transgenerational human experience; the fifth: to be confirmed; the final: Sea Sand Home (2020-2030) studies the public policy of Hong Kong on land development and Hong Kong-China integration.

The research materials of this series were published in the public online archive – The Phantom Archives in late 2022.

Archives projects

Archives projects

Archives projects

Archives projects

Archives projects

The History of not Having History

The History of not Having History

Other

Other

Other

Projects of collective

Projects of collective

Projects of collective

Mountains and their Phantoms

The Mountains and the Phantoms series looks at the political and (post)colonial dimension of the natural environment in East Asia, drawing attention to its presence, self-healing and disaster that could resolve or exacerbate the devastating effects of manmade power struggles. The series includes the following projects- Can’t Live Without (2017), For Whom the Bell Tolls (2017), The Cold Mountain (2022-) and The Longing Park (TBC).

Mountains and their Phantoms

The Mountains and the Phantoms series looks at the political and (post)colonial dimension of the natural environment in East Asia, drawing attention to its presence, self-healing and disaster that could resolve or exacerbate the devastating effects of manmade power struggles. The series includes the following projects- Can’t Live Without (2017), For Whom the Bell Tolls (2017), The Cold Mountain (2022-) and The Longing Park (TBC).

The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20)

The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20)

The entitled project, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea, aims to examine the notion of human displacement owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted in World War II in Hong Kong, China and Japan.

This project centers in a notorious historical event, namely Nanshitou Massacre. Approximately 800 thousand Hong Kong refugees were being expatriated and repatriated by the Imperial Japanese Military Government between 1942 to 1945 due to various reasons. The refugees then reached Canton (Guangzhou city), being detained at Nanshitou Refugee Camp, and forcibly received a series of human experiments and bacteriological tests.

Through archival research, field study, and interviews, the artist explores the incident with creative impulses, including film, photography, performance and sculptures, in order to create a parallel discourse adjacent to the mainstream narratives, suspend the established historical judgment, re-discover and unfold details on humanity lurks deep within us all.

In an autographic manner, the project starts with Lee’s memory of having his first art figure drawing class in his middle school in the 90s. His art teacher brought out a real human skull from the storeroom. The head alludes the school history of being occupied and turned into the Fourth Military Hospital during the war, and how Hong Kong served as a rear front to cater injured soldiers and research new methods to counter Southeast Asia Infectious Diseases. Canton fell into the hand of the Japanese in 1938, which resulted in a massive influx of immigrants from Southern China cities to Hong Kong. Hong Kong absorbed refugees, and the population rose from 800 thousand to nearly 1.6 million in a few months. In 1942, the new Imperial Japanese Military Government launched a ‘Repatriation Policy’ so as to reduce the population of Hong Kong to half and minimise the cost of governance, consumption of food and water. Thousands of Hong Kong people were forced or directed into a refuge to Nanshitou Refugee Camp, in the upstream of Pearl River Estuary. Later, Unit Nami 8604 (波8604部隊) conducted various live bacteriological and chemical experiments on the Hong Kong refugees. During the detention, the tests consumed an enormous amount of pathogen and bacteria, and the unit requested supplies from the headquarter regularly. The artist revisited Toyama Park, the former Imperial Military Medical School campus, where was the major headquarter complex for researching, producing and supplying pathogen to various Epidemic and Water Purification Units in Greater Asia, and had a performance in there. By exercising hours of labour in digging a hole, the artist attempts to re-enact the war prisoners and refugees’ manual work at wartime while internalises subconscious stances behind the violence. A piece of blue canvas covers the depression, carrying rainwater, dirt and dust over time, gradually becoming an ordinary scenery in the park, like corpses being thrown into the pond of bone corrosion. After annihilation, it becomes a part of the sea, sinking and rising again.

Behind punishment and brutality, the project interweaves oneself with voices of the minorities, that unfolds humanity, psychological states and struggles for survival that are generally not perceptible in grand historical narratives. The refugee camp served as a detention terrain, place for experiment and collecting research data, and a limbo.

The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-20)

The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-20)

The Retrieval, Restoration, and Predicament is a research/creative project. Through studying historical records and objects of Hong Kong during the last years of the Second World War, the project investigates the transition of meanings of a ‘memorial bronze statue’ brought about by the passing of time. The series of creative works, consisting of videos, sculptures, and photography, asks a number of questions.

In addition to its spiritual and symbolic meanings, how does the essence of the ‘memorial bronze statue’ evolve over time? In early 20th century British-ruled Hong Kong, colonialism manifested itself through the proliferation of bronze statues. After going through the Second World War, and the social movements of the 1950s to the 1980s, and finally the Handover, these statues have gradually become reminders of the colonial era for the proletariat. When the statue is placed in a public space as an ideological manifesto, what sorts of social discourse develop relating to the intertwining relationships between ‘the object’ and ‘the people’ in the space? If the monumentality of the statue is dependent upon the permanence of its materiality, how does the symbolism of the statue respond to the physical and spatial transitions it experienced through the Second World War, post-war and post-colonial periods?

The Imperial Japanese Army occupied Hong Kong from 1941 to 1945. In order to satisfy the material needs of total war in Greater East Asia and the Pacific, a ‘copper collection campaign’ was launched on the Home islands: to get the public to contribute any metal that could be melted down and remade into weapons, including household utensils, metal components of clothing and footwear, streetlights and lampposts, railings, temple bells, statues of gods and heroes, etc. At the same time, the Imperial Japanese Army confiscated 11 bronze statues from Statue Square in Central, Hong Kong. In August 1945, when Japan surrendered and the war ended, the British government of Hong Kong was notified by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) that four statues – Queen Victoria, two HSBC lions, and Sir Thomas Jackson (Chief manager of HSBC from 1876 to 1902) – had been discovered. After their return to Hong Kong, however, the statues were mired in a situation of restoration and predicament. This is the background in which the works in this exhibition were created.

Unfortunately, the documents pertaining to the statues’ history, like the statues themselves, are scattered and inconstant. A portion of the records and primary source materials produced before and during the war were lost in the bombing of the UK and the Japanese Home Islands. In addition, after the Japanese surrendered, they destroyed many files in Hong Kong to keep them from falling into the hands of enemy forces. But Hong Kong’s post-war archives were relatively intact, including conversations between officials, documents such as applications for funds from the colonial government to the British government, etc.; as for secondary source materials, such as newspapers and propaganda publications, there are discrepancies both because of wartime disruptions in the flow of information, and the spin each power puts on its propaganda.

For the purposes of academic research, I concentrated on the primary sources, supplemented by secondary sources, but for the purposes of artistic creation, the latter provides imaginative space and period texture. The ‘people’ from history have disappeared, but the traces they have left behind on the ‘things’ can feed the creative process, because they are the best evidence we have for the existence, speech, and behaviour of the ‘people’.

The people involved in this wartime story all tried to rediscover some things, to repair and restore an earlier situation, but couldn’t help, for a variety of reasons, falling into a predicament they could not get out of. My role in this project is also part of this cycle: retrieve (lost files and history) > restore (history and the original appearance of the statue) > become trapped (in the present context and system). ‘Archives’ are not just a record of what happened. Whether and how people can access the archives, and in what circumstances and context they can be read, also matters. I believe that the archival framework, system, and contents should be people-centred, and the participation of archive users can refashion the historical narrative.

As Boris Groys says, in modern society material trumps imagination, and people are too focused on ‘objects’ as evidence of the passage of time. We have expectations for ‘the future’; if we want to have a meeting tomorrow afternoon, we mark it in our diaries. For ‘the past’ we also have words, files, video, and images we can review. On the other hand, we are not necessarily able to fully understand, through the ‘objects’, the time that has been compressed into them. When I open a file, a gossamer-thin document may have a hundred years of history; the ratio of material to time is not constant. In this project, therefore, I hope to weave together the details from multiple historical narratives, unpeel the layers of accumulated incident, rearrange and reconnect them, and thereby illuminate the ‘present’.

The Infinite Train (2020-)

The Infinite Train (2020-)

Taking the war history as a point of departure, the research framework of The Infinite Train is based on the Greater East Asia Railroad, a mega infrastructure project proposed by the Empire of Japan in the early twentieth century. This research-based project focuses on the Manchurian belt as a meeting point between Europe and Asia, under the influences of multinational power struggle, how the concepts of human displacement and its mobility, labour of construction, emotional trauma, identity construction and transformation, ‘nation-making’ are interwoven through the transcontinental railway system and infrastructure. The project reaches out to the people who floated through history and were eventually forgotten or erased.

After the signing of Sino-Russian Secret Treaty (中俄密約) (1896), the Empire of Russia was granted the permission of building a railway in Northeast China, and in 1903 the railway was completed through the Manchurian belt, once named the ‘Eastern Qing Railway’ (東清鐵路) or ‘Chinese Eastern Railway’ (中東鐵路). Under the circumstance, the Siberian Railway, which could be connected to the Chinese Eastern Railway, greatly shortened the original plan of crossing southern Russia, making it the fastest transport link between Asia and Europe at the time, and today we call it the ‘Eurasian Land Bridge’ (亞歐大陸橋).

From 1912 onwards, Sun Yat-sen published a series of railway projects in the hope of attracting foreign investment and engineers to build a railway connecting the three major ports in China, decentralised railway lines through the country, and a link to the Siberian Railway. This mega-infrastructure plan, was once named ‘200,000 Mile Railway Project’, was published in The International Development of China, which was later translated into Chinese as ‘實業計劃’(literally means ‘Plan of Infrastructure’).

In 1938, as an alternative to the former Soviet Union’s monopoly on the Siberian Railway, the Japanese Ministry of Railways Superintendent Yumoto Noboru (湯本昇) announced the ‘Trans-Central-Asian Railway Project’ (中央アジア橫斷鉄道計畫), which proposed a railway line comparable to the Siberian Eurasian Transcontinental Railway, starting in Japanese-occupied Korea, passing through Baotou (包頭) and Xi’an (西安) in China, crossing the southern Tian Shan range into the Pamir plateau of Afghanistan, and eventually connects with the Baghdad Railway in Istanbul, Turkey. When Yumoto proposed the plan to lay railway tracks along the Central Asian region known as the ‘Silk Road’, many in Japan laughed at the absurdity of the idea, calling it a fool’s errand.

After the outbreak of the Pacific War and the fall of Singapore to the Japanese imperial forces in 1942, the ‘Greater East Asia Railroad’ (大東亞縱貫鐵道) was introduced as a series of railway clusters, which was obviously based on Yumoto’s plan. The Greater East Asia Railroad was planned to run south to Beijing, Nanjing, Hankow, Nanning, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and then south to connect with the Burma Railway and eventually with Japan’s ally Germany.

In an age when travel by air was still uncommon, man’s radical imagination of infrastructure revolved around railways and ports. Cities were simply connected by straight lines on blueprints, lands were cut out, and the geographical landscape was flattened. Infrastructure was thought of on a much larger scale than life forms, and while wartime infrastructure rose up, many people were displaced and forced to move.

Sea Sand Home (2020-)

Sea Sand Home (2020-)

Sea Sand Home is a longitudinal study project that scrutinises the public policy of Hong Kong on land development and Hong Kong-China integration. Ever since the colonial period before the Handover in 1997, Hong Kong has been introducing land policies, including reclamation, economic bonding, the emergence of the co-governance region, technology park, etc. The policy in recent years inclined to be geographically integrated with China through various mega-infrastructure projects, the integration creates a metaphorical meaning of ‘returning to the motherland’. The top-down policy leads to materials and resources reallocation, human displacement, and dismissal of borders, nevertheless, it has been overlooking the affective relations of Hong Kong people with the Mainland, and the change of identity recognition is forced.

This is the only series in the hexalogy which is parallel to the ongoing development of Hong Kong instead of taking history as the starting point.

Theatre Exile (2020-)

Theatre Exile (2020-)

Beginning with an archival photograph, Theatre Exile encapsulates a female Jewish documentary filmmaker exiled in Shanghai during World War II, who became the center of a multifaceted political and cultural struggle during the Solitude Period (孤島時期).

In my research and creative process, I have repeatedly asked myself, when looking back at this history of identity transition, how the issue of Jewish refugees in WWII has often been discussed in terms of “statelessness” and the restoration of its nation-state, both of which in fact conventional media and historical narratives project the Jewish refugees of the time as if they were one and the same, Zionism was misinterpreted as the only quest of the Jewish majority, in this overly simplified historical codification in fact flattens humanity, and the influences of many conflicted yet co-existing powers, KMT, the Japanese, Kwantung Army, Nanking government, Chungking government…and are perhaps what the project aims to address – ‘diaspora’ – apart from depicting the displacement of a community and its process of internalization in the historical context, was/is the community’s public image being shaped for a certain purpose? Have we reduced the interwoven layers of history and reality to dramatic effect? “The passive exile of ‘the people’ in the gaps between national systems, from the specific time and space of the war to present-day China, is in fact not only an ideological dichotomy, but also a deep involvement in the exchange between Europe and Asia. Thus, through this partial, faint, and ephemeral history, Theatre Exile unfolds the diasporic details of the complex entanglement of human nature, where good and evil are not obvious. This work is like swimming towards the surface in an undercurrent, obscure and yet to be seen.

They were There (2019-20)

They were There (2019-20)

Through researching the Asia Art Archive’s Ha Bik Chuen Archives, I revisit one of my own installations from 12 years ago (in 2008), and explore the relationship between public archives, artist records, plants, architecture, space and power relations in Hong Kong’s exhibition history.

Ha’s exhibition records systematically document various arts and cultural events from the 1960s to the 2000s; even today, the organisers of exhibitions do not archive those exhibitions as methodically as Ha did. Secondly, I am intrigued by the local art ecology and the way of life of artists in the last century, such as the way Ha took recorded and then had the photographs developed and printed for circulation among fellow artists as part of a gift economy. I found that ‘potted plants’ appeared and disappeared in the exhibition space as if they were being manipulated in order to introduce outdoor nature into a man-made indoor space, and the artists and curators seemed to be consciously using them for different purposes such as planning the itinerary to view the works, dividing the space, changing the texture of the space, and matching the visual elements of the artworks.

I began to question the function of the plant as a mere background and decorative piece, intuitively sensing an uncertainty in its conscious and unconscious existence. In the 1990s, the plants in the photographs gradually disappeared, and Ha’s photographic records fully reflected the transitional exhibition practice in that particular period.

Method

The research focuses on the “exhibition records” in the Ha Bik Chuen Archives, and then extends to the materials in the Hong Kong Government Public Records, the Architectural Services Department and related public art institutions. In this study, I take four public art institutions as case studies: the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Hong Kong City Hall and the University of Hong Kong- University Museum and Art Gallery. The above institutions appear more in Ha’s records, and the public nature of these institutions allowed for more research materials to be generated in the process of exhibition production, which allows me to better sort out the relationship between plants and exhibition history.

I requested materials from each of these institutions in early 2020, followed by taking panoramic photographs and filming in the space, which was then transformed into a 3D virtual reality, and finally interviews with the people in charge of the organisations. The representatives were almost unanimous in their opinion that the plants in the exhibition were of unknown origin and that the decision-making process was not fully documented.

 

3D animation: SHEN Jun

Research assistant: Man Nga Lok, Esther

 


 

Special thanks:
Asia Art Archive
Hong Kong Arts Centre
Hong Kong Museum of Art
Hong Kong City Hall
University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Government Records Service
Hong Kong Architectural Service Department

stepbackforward.art (2020-)

stepbackforward.art (2020-)

Initiated by LEE Kai Chung and SHEN Jun in 2021, stepbackforward.art is a collective art project that gathers the fragments of emerging artists’ archives and ideas scattered in the public domain, and gradually generates an online archives by weaving into a specific tagging and mapping system. An open call was launched for local emerging artists (Visual, text, sound, image, and performing artists) between the ages of 21-35, to recruit their methodologies of researching, artmaking and surviving, then to engage all participants in a dialogue to explore the connection of the local art community. The project will be presented as an online platform at the first stage, which will be released on 30th June 2021.

Under the shade of global epidemic in 2020, isolation has become a new normal, the seemingly invisible global borders have resurfaced. We deeply feel the stagnation and stasis of our times, whereas individuals become scrupulous than ever before. It is not that we are scarcely aware of the undercurrent conditions or the long-existing unsolved, only now one can no longer remain exclusive and ignorant, No Man is an Island. No matter being secluded or self-isolating, face-to-face contact has drawn fear, and digitisation seems to be the inevitable solution. However, despite that art can be encoded into strands of messages in the same way as one’s social media status, the Internet as a medium could be more than a solution to the obstacles posed by the pandemics, but contributes to rekindle real connections with each other in the midst of our predicament. As artists and art practitioners, we believe that there is no substitute for the perception and imagination that art brings. Thus, we regard stepbackforward.art as a series of exercises where conversations generate archives, fragments of ideas float across the internet, random algorithms replace preconceptions, and uncertainty turns into expectation. Everything is about surviving, continuing, breaking through, and reconstructing.

It is a yearning for ‘publicness’ that brings about stepbackforward.art, not as an institutionalised agency, but as an ‘open platform’ developed in a bottom-up approach. stepbackforward.art’s team also comprises individual art practitioners, knowing that limited resources and potential of openness are two sides of a coin. Given that the project is funded by public resources, by the same token, through reallocation of the granted resources, we expect collective effort maximises ‘publicness’. Our attempt is to outline an alternative art ‘interface’, that unfolds into a more flexible spatiotemporality of art scene paralleled to the existing.

Distinguished from the interface demonstration of conventional platforms, stepbackforward.art is designed to emphasise the performance of random retrieval of archival fragments. Rather than lining up standard artists pages composed by fixed components, the ‘artist’ appears as a comprehensive hyperlink defined by the fragments; artwork and its subject matter are no longer a universal criterion for accessing artists, we concern more about how artists develop substantial productive practices in challenging situation and system, embracing diverse perceptions and reflections of the moment and transform them into visual, audio and textual archives. The project will recruit artists by open calls and invitations then follow up with a series of dialogues, generating a tagging system and relational mapping through the keywords and archives provided by the participating artists, which develops into a continuously expanding network of collectively constructed relationships. Once diving into the website, one will be greeted by a cloud of archives and multimedia fragments randomly delivered and displayed in real time. Users can browse through the floating materials in the interface, encountering occasional pop-ups of noise, as if they are navigating a world of thoughts that will not be silenced.

It is believed that moving forward is always the destination of stepping back. Through stepbackforward.art, we strive to preserve part of the ‘present’, a narrow rift stretched by fragmented archives in the online space-time and an interstice in the transition of generations and the times.

 

Mutual Aid

As the project is mainly funded by community resources, we hope to create a gift economy between the parties, even limited resources can be redistributed to those in need during difficult times.

Honorarium will be paid to participating artists that choose to contribute in questionnaires, dialogues and publication. Online resources and pedagogies will be published and made available for free online download.

 

Cooperative Learning

stepbackforward.art will be developed into a sustainable archives, search engine and pedagogy exchange platform for archive creators and web users to learn together – demonstrating the link between data, keywords and people in real time generative visuals, like breaking down each page of a book and laying it out again on a desk; the juxtaposed methodologies also help web users to interpret artists’ practices, while facilitating interaction and collaborative learning among artists.

 

Connectivity

Regarding the art world, the pandemic has not only severely affected local physical events and exhibitions, but has also forced the cancellation of international physical exchanges due to the necessary costs of travelling. Under this circumstance, artists have to adapt their practice accordingly; by documenting those changes, it will open up the possibilities and creativity of international exchange. stepbackforward.art algorithmically regroups the keywords tagging and methodologies provided by the artists, as a result, personal and contemporary contexts will be sorted out. The project will culminate in an online index and archives that will serve as both a showcase, relational map and search engine for artist information, artistic practices and methodologies.

This reinforced connection between individuals and communities transcends the spatiotemporal limitations of the existing art system, would somewhat reveal a dynamic art ecology derived from Hong Kong and open up a potential mode of participation.

 

Credits: This project is supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council “Arts Go Digital Platform Scheme”.
The [Im]possibility of Art Archives: Theory and Experience in/from Asia (2023)

The [Im]possibility of Art Archives: Theory and Experience in/from Asia (2023)

Editor: Dr. Pan Lu
Assistant editor: Lee Kai Chung

This edited volume aims to fill the gap in the research, juxtaposition, and focused discussions in the existing literature on art archives in Asia. Most of the archives included in the book are independent and initiated by individuals, folk groups, or non-profit organisations. In this book, one can trace the dynamics and self-generative capacity in this particular historical and cultural milieu through these “alternative” archives and through the practices of artists and curators who apply their specific understanding of archive to their works. Many chapters resonate with each other in that they capture the experiences shared by many places in Asia. Those experiences could have resulted from the encounter with the Western idea of archive, the influence of the colonial experience, or a memory crisis triggered by the rapid transformation of media, and may serve as a basis for producing archive theories in/from Asia. The book provides an opportunity for the archives in Asia and those who work around them to recognise one another, understand what their colleagues in archival work do, how they do it and what else there is for them to do.

The Phantom Archives (2021-)

The Phantom Archives (2021-)

Developed alongside our (Lee Kai Chung + Shen Jun) research, The Phantom Archives initiative continuously archives sensuous and perceptual moments. The initiative departs from Lee’s artistic research series Displacement, also derives from our online archive StepBackForward.art that attempts to archive collective status in transitional times since 2020. The Phantom Archives publicises our encounters and ideas of our research to the best of our capacity, invites contributions and collaboration from friends, meanwhile conducts open calls for personal memories, stories and materials, hoping to include plural and reverberating voices. The archival index could be found at phantomarchives.com (designed by Oooo Studio), which will be further developed into dialogues, publications, collective walking tours and a physical project space. The first art book of this archive project, entitled No Misery, was published in 2022.

The phrasing of the Chinese title of The Phantom Archives, ‘虛無鄉’ (literal translation ‘voidness/nothingness’), is inspired by the Chinese translation of News From Nowhere (William Morris, 1890)[1], published by Shanghai Water Foam Bookstore in 1930. The original novel came out as a serial fiction on newspaper, gradually contouring a Utopian speculation from afar. From our perspective, this act of sending messages from nowhere makes faint noises of hope on the plane interface ought for the truth’. We borrow this phrase as a reminder of our initiative and mission.

Looking into the negative space of ‘historical truth’ and ‘professional archive’, The Phantom Archives pursues alternatives for the unarchivable and lived experiences, as our response to the sophisticated politics behind archive, history and publicness that are always our concern. Given the pattern of our work and life-living, The Phantom Archives is an ever-transiting, fragmented and archiving detour process, navigating the unspeakable histories and realities, the unsettled emotions and memories. Through researching, fieldwork, fictionalising, collaboration and open calls, we endeavour to give hints on perspectives in the interstices of institutional archive – performative memories, ambiguous narratives, identities in transition and entangled affect. We seek for an oblique path to the void of histories, letting go of polarisation between professional and amateur, objective and subjective, factual and fictional. In this sense, we expect the initiative creates its site of multi-temporalities intersecting past and present, here and there, whereby multiple possibilities reveal themselves. The perspective of The Phantom Archives also shifts from definitive ‘archive’ towards the processual ‘archiving’ as open, embodied movements. It concerns how abandoned lives in their own realities would find some sense of direction through seemingly soundless and powerless gestures.

 


 

[1] William Morris, News From Nowhere (虚无乡消息), trans. Lin Weiyin (Shanghai: Water Foam Bookshop, 1930).

The History of United Front (2013-)

The History of United Front (2013-)

So Many Quiet Walks to Take (2016)

So Many Quiet Walks to Take (2016)

From 2013 to 2016, I have been dealing with the symbolic implication of power over history archives and records in Hong Kong. The “archives” have never been a value-free site of collection. Instead, power is revealed through historiographic constitution, which is my major research subject and source material of artistic practice.

Taking a retrospective look on my research methodology, I find that I am archiving and inserting myself as moments in history. The act of turning physical documents and records into art is also that of reconfiguring my own mental system. Giving a structure to archivable documents is at once making them available as “strategums” (Barthes) and embodying one’s subjective mnemonic focus, “punctums.” The process of recognising the mentally housed inscription, organising “documents” and externalising as art is the key to the entitled exhibition. The process is long and solitutary, like taking quiet walks by oneself. Sometimes the anxiety overwhelms me, but then I have to calm myself down before going back to my working desk.

A series of apparently unrelated everyday life objects, photographs and moving images allude to my psychic archivization of my own practice and memories. I remove the objectivity that is somehow conceived with the conventional notion of archive and its formulation and, instead, looks for alternative narratives.

So Many Quiet Walks to Take is a prelude to my next project, in which the body of work sustains in curating memory but, in the end, buries it as well.

The Order of Things (2017)

The Order of Things (2017)

The Order of Things addresses the cycling system of Things under the establishment of the Hong Kong Government; through artistic practice and intervention, the collective centers the research on the empirical, evidential and social value of things in relation to the system that generates them.

The public auction is held by Government Logistics Department on a regular basis since 2003; it was firstly held in the late nineteenth century in Hong Kong. Confiscated items, unclaimed goods and unused equipment from various sources are open for bidding during the auction. The things, or “artifacts” become empty vessels that intrigue public interest, on their economic significance instead of any of their intrinsic, archival and archaeological value. We create things that in turn they create us; a chain of economic activities is generated by the government, the auction is one of the prominent dots of the circle. Apart from the social process resulting from symptomatic determinism, where do those things come from? Why are they so many? Things are being put together, or Foucault put it as Resemblance, which reveals the kinships as well as the grammar of being. While “grammar” alludes whenever vocabulary and phrase are placed in a certain order, it generates literal meaning and forms a system of language, hence, the analogy brings light to the multifaceted quality of the project, in other words, the phenomena of their existence.

The very first layer of Things comes with their physicality, how they were used and can be used now, what are their conditions, how they are being displayed for previewing, how they are being described on the auction list. The second layer connects its intrinsic value to monetary value and human activity — how much they can be resold for, how minimal description put the bidders in a situation that he/she has to associate with his/her past experience in the auction, who is engaged in circulating the things as secondary production. The third layer is abstract and ideological, which leads to language, system, and history, while things direct human activity, but also shape our cognition and knowledge ―the stability of goods supply reveals the circuit between auction and local market, how objects are generated by the system and in turn, they affect the system, how the auction is conducted in an unnatural manner.

In this respect, the auction-things system provides a wide range of context for us to explore, from the moment when items were first being acquired to identification, categorization, storage, the procedural decision on auction listing and lastly fall into bidders’ hands; it passes stories from time to time, as it suggests things’ functionality and materiality, consequently opens up potential in their historiographical quality. Something is being disposed and others remain on the list, the things are being sorted according to the source instead of any other classification methodologies. The government possesses an ultimate authority to maintain the existing ecosystem of circulating things, in other words, the ability to narrate clearly the alterity of objects with political regime, which is not necessarily the full picture of our common recognition of the system. How does power exert a mode of subjectification on individuals?

What constitutes the accumulation of things, as an archive that differentiates itself from merely documents and records; by reading, decoding, and recording the signs embedded in the things, various artists in the collective adopt their own practice to encounter problems with problems.

The Order of Things is the first project by the artist collective “Archive of the People”.

A Guide to Archive Me (2018)

A Guide to Archive Me (2018)

Search Engine, publication, public programs, moving images

 

Project initiative

 

The project comprises an Art(ist) Searching Engine (*archiveme.art), and an array of affiliated events, encounters, collaboration with art practitioners, and publication. The project marks the beginning of long-term research on the constitution of “archive” in general and calls the archival governance in public art institutes in question, as well as how the materials are managed in physical repository and online platforms.

To manifest that art can be a constructive and subversive form of engaging the notion of archiving, AOP is developing a robust Art(ist) Searching Engine, which

1) facilitates searching scattered artist information on the internet;

2) analyses artist website with statistics;

3) engages various art practitioners to collectively constitute the keywords database;

4) allows artists to review searching relevance and revamp the keywords;

5) eventually builds a rhizomatic network that connects the institutional online database and artist websites.

*The website is currently suspended due to changes in personnel, and data cannot be retrieved. Ironically, an archive project ends up with a disruption of self-archiving.

The Coffee has Faded, because the Ice has Melted (2019)

The Coffee has Faded, because the Ice has Melted (2019)

Café do Brasil stimulates Archive of People to re-imagine the essence of collectiveness, and open up conversation among the collective members via e-meetings.

Fragmented thoughts travel through Brazil, coffee, public space, social movement, togetherness and time, which then extend to personal memories and feelings. Sitting in Café do Brasil, one may feel a sense of being elevated, with people inside and the harbour outside, a glass window separates the two, as if the flow of the outside world is slowing down.

The elevated platform in the exhibition allows things to settle and others to get afloat, like a delicate layer of dense milk frothing over the coffee. A few sips of milk-flavoured air are taken before exploring the differences in the extracted coffee. In order to find a balance between the differences, Archive of People offers a special blend of coffee beans as a kind of spiritual bonding within the organisation. Members will each choose a particular type of coffee bean, blend it in different proportions, and have a coffee tasting session.

It takes time for the iced coffee to drip, and the barista, with his back to the platform, says: “Good things come in small steps, everything in its own pace.

“The coffee has faded because the ice has melted.” She tells us slowly.

The coffee has never changed in composition, so it’s only natural that the flavour fade, but it has finally become a cup of iced coffee that is difficult to talk about properly. Is it complicated by the fact that the ice is made up of water? 

The ice-maker asks, “Does the coffee taste less pure when ice is added?”

Did it taste worse? And then she sings, “It goes bad, it’s not a big deal.”

Right on. It’s the most important to fix the broken. There are people in the world who say they are broken, and there are people who say the system is torn. Maybe this elevated platform will be a little buffer zone for us to regroup in a coffee break.

The coffee observer pauses to listen to the cracking sound in the ice, to watch the dripping of ice water, the constant transformation of liquid to ice then eventually back to liquid, over and over again, it runs through the mouth and then into the rest.

Can’t Live Without (2017)

Can’t Live Without (2017)

Can’t live Without originates from my research on art archives and their social context in Korea. By employing artistic research and representation, the body of work sheds light on how power structure influences the pattern of archival practice and historiography. The filmatic sequence consists of five chapters, which cover a rhizomatic network of social movement, language, mythology, geography, and archival discipline. The notion of discontinuity for historic narratives leads to a greater consciousness of events and individuals.

The Cold Mountain (2022-)

The Cold Mountain (2022-)

A mysterious mountain – its dense forests, valleys, miasma, swamps and fairy springs are parts of an organic life form that heals the wounded and accommodates the lost souls. China capitalised on the privileged position of its southern cities to rebuild international relations and economic recovery during the Cold War, with the mountain serving as a secret frontline base. At the same time, people were worn out in the cycle of promotion and abandonment of ideologies while suffering from the tensions in the country and beyond. Those who fled to the mountain in search of refuge suddenly found that it held their lost beliefs.

 

In 1965, before the breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations, Mr. Wu flew again to Guangzhou from the north, this time with the important task of uniting the “Third World” countries. When his aeroplane arrived at the airport earlier than expected, with half a day to go before his meeting with a foreign affairs minister, Mr Wu took advantage of the extra time to spontaneously change his itinerary, intending to enter the mountain, where was safe from war, epidemics and flooding, and visit the newly built villa. His bodyguard was very nervous, as it would have been easy to get lost in nature without a guide. The guard arranged for the help of a mountain hermit to save Mr. Wu from the risk of assassination again. The hermit, who had been evacuated from Hong Kong to the mountain some years ago, saw that there was something special, so he stayed and became the mountain watchman. Time is elastic in the mountain, and the hermit experienced the passage of time differently from the rest of the world; he could see what would happen but did not speak about the guard’s request and the arrival of Mr. Wu.

Mr. Wu spent one night in deep sleep in the mountain villa, waking up the next morning just fine, but feeling a bit cold in the late spring. The living and the dead were not as quiet as they seemed, nevertheless, the unrest night returned to peace in the first light of dawn, and people thought it was because of The Cold Mountain.

This project is supported by b minor studio.

Part I: George and the Swimming Pool(2019)
Part III: The Enka Singer (2019)
Part II: The Smoking Lady (2019)
Part IV: The Digger (2019)
Part V: The Remains of the Night (2020)
Part VI: The Containers (2019-20)
Part VIII: The Dust (2020)
Part VII: Outcast (2020)
You do see me crossing the meadow stiff and dead from the mist?

You do see me crossing the meadow stiff and dead from the mist?

“You do see me crossing the meadow stiff
and dead from the mist?”

Text: ZHANG Yu-hang

 

In Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Dark Souls 3, “Aldrich, the Devourer of Gods” foresees the coming Age of the Deep Sea. In the game, the Age of the Deep Sea is (implicitly) described as a world where silence and all life will return to stillness, ruled by the ‘Deep’.

The Deep Sea is the ultimate in fascist aesthetics. The supremacy and fatalism of violence turn to a subtlety, long and deep silence. Most of the monsters in Dark Souls are silent, in Aleksandr Sokurov’s film, the Showa Emperor’s [1] Japanese phrases convey nothing. Upon entering the exhibition, The Smoking Lady smokes cigarettes in silence. Her delicate short hair is thought to confront an unpredictable fate, but it exposes her. Rather than fleeing from danger, she is herself the bait for that supreme violence. The exile of the refugees, the concentration camp, the germ experiments of Unit 8604, must have required a smoking beauty to complete the seduction of the victim’s complicity with the persecutor in “The Death’s Appointment in Samarra”, which the world mistakenly calls fate.

However, the fascist aesthetics is not bailed by the production of nostalgic Romanticist desires. In contrast, the Cold War spacecraft was derived from the angels in the ancient Greek frescoes and tantric mantras of Esoteric Buddhism, and the three narrow routes to “the Deep Sea” were, in fact, shortcuts in the vast system of warfare and material hubs that Japan used throughout Southeast Asia (including Southern China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Malay Peninsula, in fact from the British colonial period). And Hong Kong, whether as the “Pearl of the Orient” during the British colonial period, or as the hub of the cold and ambiguous love of Cyber in the 90s, or as the escapees of the present-day held hostage by the powers through the Hong Kong Extradition Bill, the “beauty” exudes a deadly allure on the Narrow Road. It is only that the model of the system and the plan is more real than the reality, where the undertones of reality deepen gradually, and the pure darkness awaits after the limits; the paradise always turns into a dark “Deep Sea”, where the waste disposal center of the whole system eventually engulfs everything. That’s why The Digger is a testament to the old alchemical maxim: As Above, So Below. The logistical chains of death soar and a magnificent yet inverted metropolis are built at the seabed. The Deep Sea is a matter, a hard and muddled substance. Mechanical and repetitive consumption, that is the figure that operates at the bottom of the sea.

The nature of the Japanese language is that it can convey messages while dissolving nothingness. Whether it is the rhyme of the refugees in the Nanshitou concentration camp (The Enka Singer) or the pale yet strong words delivered by the Japanese soldier while he was defending himself in the post-war Court-martial in Guangzhou in George and the Swimming Pool, their messages seem to dissipate into the uneven brick walls in the exhibition, reflecting the speechlessness of the skull stuck to the swimming pool. In George and the Swimming Pool and Outcast, the artist’s speech is clear and precise, almost to the point of ‘stickiness and dizziness’, and we cannot help but question if the monologue in Outcast is the sound of a living creature.

In Dark Souls 3, Aldrich attempts to continue the Age of the Deep Sea in his prophecy through eating people (and eventually, gods). Gradually, he comes to possess the minds and memories of the people and gods he devours. Unbeknownst to him, it is through his endless devouring that he becomes part of the Deep, just like Unit 8604’s bone-dissolving pool at Nanshitou, ‘made of human bodies, becomes the Deep Sea’, as the artist puts it.

You do see me crossing the meadow stiff
and dead from the mist?[4]

– Robert Walser

 


 

[1] Sokurov, Aleksandr, The Sun, 2005.
[2] Unit 8604 was the Japanese Guangzhou 8604th unit during the invasion of China, and is thought to have conducted germ warfare and live bacteriological experiments. The Nanshitou Refugee Camp mentioned in The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea series is thought to be associated with its bacteriological experiments.
[3] There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra. (O’Hara, John, Appointment in Samarra, 1934).
[4] Walser, Rober, Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser, Black Lawrence Press, 2012.

Seeing “those who parted by unexpected fate”

Seeing “those who parted by unexpected fate”

Seeing “those who parted by unexpected fate” (Excerpt)

Text: Zhang Zimu

 

I still remember The Relentless Voyage, a public event organized by Chung during his WMA exhibition. No event details were given except for simple security rules to obey on the sea. The other passengers happened to also be women. Wearing masks, we all sat quietly in our own chosen corners on the boat. In the one hour and a half journey, the only sight was the Hong Kong coastline gradually extending to the estranged and remote side. The sole familiar image was the bumping gesture and the taste of nausea rising within my body. With the projection of the exhibition, I first considered it a journey of “experience”, to feel what the refugees of forced migration experienced in reductionist ocean travel. The sense of moral ambiguity and bewilderment occupied the first half of my journey. However, in the casual chat after the returning trip, I was surprised to learn the drastic difference in participants’ feelings. One foreign artist felt complete liberation and ease as she was just out of the hotel quarantine. Even with a loaded mind, I still saw many surprising scenes, including a butterfly vigorously crossing the sea against the wind, a small ancient temple by the seawall and a man fishing outside a tent… All these subtleties were not to be reduced by the extrinsic frameworks like “return to” and “re-experience” history. Chung documented every such journey with video, sound and texts, as well as participants’ immediate feelings. These documentations may be merged into the following exhibitions, making another “Archive of the People.”

After researching historical archives and visiting historical sites, what Chung did was not to visualize historical data, nor to seek responsibility and make accusations. Rather he chose to do something possibly more difficult, by projecting and performing with his own body and senses to generate empathy. The two-channel video The Remains of the Night fabricated an intimate solace between two survivors of the Nanshitou refugee camp. When tongue was cut bit by bit, skin withered slowly, gnawed over by mosquitos with malaria…this absurdity of war was conducted rationally in the name of science. Yet two lives cast in the mess still had the opportunity to meet and watch the new year fireworks, to have an instance of liberation and transcendence, before their fatal fates. Different from passionate death lavishly rendered by patriotism, Chung distinguishes tender but tenacious and abundant humanity as well as affection amidst despair. If war is a means of dehumanization, the popular historical dramas are transhumanistic depictions of both heroes and enemies. Chung builds up a quotidian theatre with filmic writing on the debris of historical archives, in which the strangers that enter, regardless of identity, all behold rich affections and sensibilities, and are capable of making dialogue with modern viewers in different shores of the historical flow.

When I listened to an online discussion at HB Station, some audiences expressed their doubt over the ethics of Chung’s working method. Chung responded that he believed in personal instinct and motivation. The seemingly objective data and descriptions cannot get us closer to a real living person. This could be associated with how we understand “empathy”. According to scholars Hans A. Alma and Adri Smaling (2011), empathy is not pure psychological identification and “to be one”, as one individual can never really switch to be the other and experience what the other has been through. Therefore, they suggested, empathy was to place oneself in another’s experiential world, through the imagination of their own emotions (p.203-204). I sense such empathy in Chung’s works. When describing the burning experiment in a laboratory, he filmed his own arm with tattoos. The above-mentioned firework element was historical, it also stemmed from his visual experience of Japan’s summer fireworks during an artist residency program, as well as the then haunted news coverage of the tear gas smog in Hong Kong streets. Moreover, the artist himself had displaced his own body to enter the recreated historical terrain to sense and act. In another video The Digger, he went to the Toyama Park in Shinjuku district of Tokyo, one of the former laboratory sites affiliated with Unit 731, started digging a tomb for himself among passersby’s reserved manner or indifference, like many refugees, were forced to do so. When we look into the screens, are we emotionally much closer to the observers in history and in present times, or the forced tomb diggers? This is the openness of Chung’s works. The incorporation of his quarantine experience into the exhibition curation also shows a sensitivity for his own body while persistently executing a working methodology to access the other through the self.

Scholar and curator Jill Bennett (2005) wrote in a book on trauma and art, that this type of art is more transactive than communicative, “it often touches us, but it does not necessarily communicate the ‘secret’ of personal experience” (p.7). The distinguishing feature of Chung’s work also lies in the further entanglement with the “transactive”, putting the highly tenacious identities to overlap in an obscure and ambiguous space. In The Enka Singer, a Japanese elder, who participated in the Japanese student movement, performed the poem from Nanshitou camp in the style of Japanese traditional Enka; A Japanese friend of the artist acted as a young Hong Kong lady during wartime (The Smoking Lady), who smoked the last cigarette before she had her hair cut to disguise herself as a man and flee. In these performances that broke through the boundary of the epochs of geography, confined nationalities and body politics became dubious, their contradictions explicitly revealed.

This series of works was created from 2019 to 2020, parallel with rising global social movements and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The imagination and conjecture of war have flooded social media, borders, as well as identities, which have frequently been the triggers for social debates. The narrative built around the Nanshitou refugee camp also contributed towards the shifting boundaries around being a “Hong Konger”. The Nanshitou refugee camp was built on the condition of the explosion of the WWII population in Hong Kong. After the Japanese army occupied Guangzhou, a large number of Canton refugees fled to HK and caused a resource shortage. The Japanese army aimed to reduce the Hong Kong population by publishing the repatriation policy, which used deceptive methods to send back 500,000 to 800,000 refugees to China, including a ratio of Hong Kong residents whose ancestral hometowns were in Canton. Many lost their lives during the sea voyage and later in the Nanshitou refugee camp. For the Hong Kong exhibition in March 2020, several review articles referred to these refugees as “Hong Kong refugees” or “Hong Kongers”. Among them, one article clearly stated the correlation with the Anti-Extradition Movement, describing a historical precedent of extradition to China, overlooking the misplacement of identity and borders in the event. When compared with Hong Kong-Canton discussions nowadays, this conversation on identities becomes rather intriguing. Chung openly confessed his inspirations stemmed from violent migrations in history and the drifting condition of Hong Kong today in terms of his own work. This reflection is not a linear comparison of past and present, but constantly opening up bifurcations on smooth narratives.

As I recounted my sea voyage from Sai Wan Ho ferry pier into the South China Sea, I only realised that we might have crossed the border through the sight of a boat hanging the Chinese national flag. While breathing cigarette fumes with the Japanese/Hong Kong/Canton lady, I sensed the artist refused to ascribe to the dichotomous thought behind geo-war and body-war. Facing the historical ruins and comebacks of new struggles, any clear border narration risked impotence and futility. However, using art as a means for border-crossing and chronotope-transpassing, as well as entering “The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea” with someone’s own physicality, makes it possible for us to see “those who parted by unexpected fate”—— as Chung once wrote in his work.

 


 

Reference:

Bennett, Jill. Empathic vision: Affect, trauma, and contemporary art. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Alma, Hans A., and Adri Smaling. “The meaning of empathy and imagination in health care and health studies.” International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being 1, no. 4 (2006): 195-211.

Publication: “OUTCAST”
It means I won’t be back

It means I won’t be back

It means I won’t be back

A research project on “Sea” and “Diaspora” (Excerpt)

Text: LEE Kai Chung

 

[…]

 

After the War – On Heritage and its Conservation

 

On September 1, 2002, the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture listed the Guangdong-Hong Kong Customs and Quarantine Station of the Japanese Southern China Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Unit under Registered Protected Cultural Relics in Guangzhou (CW84), a designation established in April 1941 during the Occupation period, when the Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Public Works claimed part of the land at Nanshitou for the establishment of the Quarantine Station. It is the only listed historical building in the Nanshitou Incident, but six other architectural structures are still pending archaeological assessment. On February 22, 2017, representatives of the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation visited Nanshitou and claimed that they were considering raising funds for conservation and urban planning. In March of the same year, 23 members of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) proposed to “build a monument and a memorial museum for the victims of the Japanese Army’s germ-weapon massacre in Nanshitou”, and resolved to “protect the ruins and architecture and prepare the memorial museum in phases”. Two years have passed, and when I conducted field research in Nanshitou between late 2019 and early 2020, the ruins of the refugee camp were surrounded by fences, and all buildings were basically demolished except for the walls of the automobile factory. There are also no signs, such as “Public notice of Historic Buildings” or “Protected Heritage”, in the vicinity of the refugee camp site, and some buildings are at risk of collapse as a result of dilapidation. For example, the main building of the Quarantine Station has been in disrepair for a long time; the roof has been severely damaged by typhoons and rain, and the internal ceiling shows signs of water leakage. Parts of the building were defaced, vandalized (ie. the ceiling at the top of the doorway showed signs of being burnt) and dismantled. The two stone pillars on either side of the main entrance and in front of it are painted with Communist slogans from the Cultural Revolution era, with a piece of paper with Japanese inscription still left on the ceiling of the main entrance, which theoretically should be preserved intact with the historical wholeness of a heritage. In 1994, the Director’s Room on the second floor was still there. In addition, the structure and pavement in front of the building were occupied and converted to the Nanhe Road Police Station, and a slope was built in the open space in front of the Quarantine Station, which leads to the residential houses on the hill. From a conservation point of view, the overall connectivity of the heritage was disrupted, as the Hong Kong refugees, upon disembarkation, had to go to the Quarantine Station for initial examination before being transferred to the refugee camp or other departments, or being directly released. Therefore, according to the map drawn by Mr. Leung from Shunde, Guangdong, the Quarantine Station was also called the “Upper Station”, while the “Lower Station” was another Quarantine Station in the west, now a residential area. The difference between “Upper” and “Lower” could be geographic locations or refer to the sequence in which the refugees entered Nanshitou, since “Lower” in Japanese has the additional meaning of “next place”. According to Professor Tan Yuenheng, after visiting the Quarantine Station in 2016 with volunteers and engineers, he felt the building was at risk of collapse and urged the heritage department to repair it, after which it was learnt that about RMB100,000 or so was granted to the department. Unfortunately, the relevant departments have not carried out any repairs at the time this article was written.

Another artifact related to the incident, the Memorial of the Guangdong-Hong Kong Refugees, is located in a neighbourhood along Nanji Road where a locked metal gate is installed, rendering it inaccessible to non-residents. There is also a lack of signage at the entrance to the neighbourhood. The open area around the memorial has been privatized by the neighbourhood residents, who store their personal belongings and generally occupy the space. Display panels showing the typical historical narrative of the Chinese Communist Party are installed behind the memorial, but rubbish has been stuffed behind the glass panels, and nobody appears to keep them tidy.

Professor Tan speculates that there are some other historical buildings whose heritage could hark back to World War II, such as a separate architectural cluster in the northwest of Nanshitou Village that could have been another Quarantine Station, as well as the kitchen of the refugee camp, or a Red Cross medical clinic on the hill (formerly ‘Japanese Hill’), etc. Existing references are mainly drawn from interviews of nearby villagers and refugees in the early 1990s, and at this stage, only reasonable inferences can be made based on the geographical context and Japanese deployment at the time, etc. After the founding of New China, there were new construction projects of the Guangzhou Automobile Factory and the Guangzhou Paper Mill Dormitory respectively in the district; meanwhile, villagers have also occupied and made various degrees of unauthorized building works or alterations to the above-mentioned buildings.

Many local researchers and citizens who are concerned about the incident have proposed to the Guangzhou Municipal Government to conserve Nanshitou’s heritage and promote its history, and even collaborated with local organizations to design a museum and theme park. However, the proposal was later shelved due to the demolition of the automobile factory, land ownership and the Guangdong government’s desire to use the former industrial site for commercial purposes, and also due to the pandemic in 2020.

At the original site of the refugee camp, Nanshitou 28 Creative Park has been planned, which falls under the governance of Qianzhan Industry Research Institute (前瞻產業研究院), an enterprise that claims to collaborate with the government, academic institutions and private corporates; it specifies that it works in real estate planning and big data research. Nearby, the 31 Road Photography Creative Park in the same district has already started running. The “Upper House” or Japanese Hill area is now occupied by various dwellings, and Nanshi West Village is mainly a residential area for factory workers, people in the recycling business and citizens who settled in after the war. The opposite bank of the Wood-washing Pond is still occupied by a group of factories. The area around Taikoo and Osaka warehouses in the north of Nanshitou has been successfully transformed from a cargo transfer station into a recreational and cultural district, with residential estates, hotels, shopping malls and commercial buildings. This gentrification is likely to extend to Nanshitou; with enterprises such as Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, which was originally dedicated to the development of light and heavy industry lots, now shifting to arts and cultural studios and technology research labs. I think it is less likely in the current development context of Mainland China that the city would choose to develop Nanshitou, with its beautiful scenic view of Pearl River, into a museum district purely for conservation and commemorating war history, instead of developing it into a multi-functional district with a mix of real-estate projects and commercial developments. On the other hand, it is a common practice for cities to expand into suburbs, and a large proportion of the historic sites are now built with residential high-rises, so one can imagine the serious impact on housing prices if the history of refugee camp and discovery of the corpses were to become part of the museum’s narrative. At this specific time, as a result, conservation and local development are at odds, and cooperation – or conflict – between corporations, plutocrats and the city government is becoming more obvious.

At the Fifth Session of the 12th CPPCC Committee, the suggestion was made that “the Municipal Cultural and Heritage Departments may take the lead in conducting an archaeological exploration of the relevant cultural relics”. This necessarily involves considerable difficulties because the area around Nanji Road, where the bodies were once excavated, has been developed into different small neighbourhoods. Once an archaeological survey must be conducted, a long-term negotiation and mutual agreement between residents and management companies has to be reached. If the survey is carried out at the Nanshitou Refugee Camp, the difficulty is relatively low, as the automobile factory has been demolished. However, In early 2020, I saw bulldozers begin to clear the rubble and ruins, presumably in preparation for construction, but it is unknown whether this is done by a private plutocrat or the city government. Once construction has started, even if there are new archaeological discoveries, I am afraid that transparency will be a crucial issue in the context of conservation. If and when more bodies are found – which would affect the reputation and profitability of future property projects – the developers will likely hide the discoveries in order to facilitate progress.

What has been discussed above relates mainly to the hardware of the incident. Moreover, if the heritage conservation of the architectural complex is to be advanced, the city government should invite historians and archaeologists to further study the deed of property, ownership and structure of the building based on official materials, while consulting with residents, a study on land resumption and resurveying need to be initiated. However, political factors and local power relations are likely to be crucial factors.

As for software and public education, a group of local educators and conservationists have conducted interviews with villagers and residents since the 1990s. But I believe that a more systematic and longitudinal study is required, covering the following: firstly, interviews with the surviving workers of the Paper Mill and the automobile factory; secondly, interviews with the local villagers and the surviving refugees; and thirdly – which is exactly what I am doing now with this project – is to initiate an open call to the public in Guangdong and Hong Kong through social-media platforms and local contacts, to find all the Hong Kong refugees who were repatriated at that time, as well as their relatives and second or third generations. According to Feng Qi, a survivor from the camp, “When the Kuomintang was about to take over the refugee camp before the Japanese surrender in 1945, there were few refugees left in the camp, especially those from Hong Kong. Thousands of refugees were released and scattered. ” In addition, Hong Kong refugees had the opportunity to stay and settle in Guangdong Province and even other cities in Mainland China after the war, so there are many unknown factors in the third initiative, which will require more manpower and time to investigate. In the open call, I am mainly concerned about the identities of the deceased refugees, and the lives of the refugees after the war.

[…]

Since last year, the pandemic has in some ways created a stronger connection to and empathy for the Nanshitou Incident, even if what I am feeling at the moment is far less than what the refugees suffered. This project has been shown in various exhibitions and occasions, and each time I tried to legitimize a connection to the venue. The exhibition at HB Station Contemporary Art and Research Center was not only a remnant of a scene from fragmented memories, but also led the audience and participants into two public programmes: a walking tour entitled “A Walk by the Sea” and an open-air screening. The latter made me contemplate once more the meaning of the work in relation to the present and the locality. The screening, in the original location of the refugee camp, moved me more than ever. I did not have preconceptions about how the villagers would perceive this so-called artwork, or whether the mysteries of history would be resolved. The screening was filled with a young audience, while elsewhere, villagers were discussing how their grandparents survived the occupation. An older woman was walking back and forth within the area, another villager stopped by and watched the film while she was walking her dog, and a solemn-looking subdistrict officer took plenty of pictures. While he was paying attention to the content of the video, he was also distracted by the reaction of the audience. The monologues and sound effects with the projection became intertwined with the sound of cargo ships chirping on the Pearl River in the distance, and workers renovating the Shrine of Merit behind the audience. Perhaps I cannot expect a single project to re-organize all the historical complexities, nor are the “new discoveries” of my research are necessarily inspiring; but by taking the work out of its conventional artistic realm, and adding a sense of everydayness and locality, overlapping it with the realities of daily life, at least it opens up the possibility of dialogue with various kinds of people.

During the project, I interviewed a 93-year-old lady who had experienced the refugee camp, the end of World War II, the Chinese civil war, New China, the Communist era, etc. I put her and her interview into the work that was shown in the outdoor screening: The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea, Part V: The Remains of the Night (2020). During the interview and conversation with the woman, she repeated that what had been engraved in her mind was not the misery of the war and the ease with which people could control their fate, but the fact that for the next 80 years after the war, while remaining unruffled having experienced so many ups and downs, the social welfare system was what could comfort her heart. That is her reality, existing outside of the numbers and causes and consequences recorded in the archives.

While artists hope that their works don’t merely create a definite conclusion of history, we always believe that the imagination brought out by art is productive and meaningful to real life and that the audience can fill the void with their own conclusions. When discussing this notion with my fellow artist Zhu Jianlin, he mentioned that the younger generation may be resistant to fill in and create when they are given this imaginative space, because authoritative education and the social and institutional framework over the years have diminished the mechanisms, vocabulary and techniques for generating “imagination”, which is, as mentioned earlier, one of the fundamentals for critical thinking in historical research. In a sharing session at HB Station, a friend questioned how this project could be expanded. Perhaps the artist could promote the openness and creativity of history on an epistemological level through works of art, just as I have postulated, by reorganizing and criticizing history and the present. In addition, I deeply believe that the perception taken by the artwork transcends rational thinking and language, and the shimmering light can stimulate the pursuit of goodness in human nature, showing empathy and care to the suffering and to the world.

(Article was written in June 2020, revised in February 2021.)

 


 
The essay was published on OUTCAST (2021).

The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament: Bronze sculptures (2018-19)
The Relentless Voyage (2020)
The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament – single-channel video (2018)
I Could Not Recall How I Got Here (2019)
The Memorial (2019)
The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament: prints (2019)
A Performative Reading by “the Six” (2020)
Made in Occupied Japan (2018-2020)
Publication: “I could not recall how I got here”
The Retrieval, Restoration, and Predicament: Objects, memories and records in wartime

The Retrieval, Restoration, and Predicament: Objects, memories and records in wartime

The Retrieval, Restoration, and Predicament: Objects, memories and records in wartime [Excerpt]

Text: Lee Kai Chung

 

During the occupation of Hong Kong, a great deal of money was taken for the Japanese military in the Pacific and other theatres. So, the cash-strapped Hong Kong government, faced with an enormous cost for repair and maintenance expenses, appealed to HSBC Bank [1], which had paid for the development of Statue Square before the war, but HSBC was struggling with its own property damage and lost assets. […] After the Japanese surrender, HSBC staff found large quantities of property that did not belong to the bank or its customers [2], including gold and silver jewellery, military supplies, opium, etc. […] So, the government decided to sell these items through public auction [3] to raise money to rebuild public buildings and restore statues. However, another problem arose: not all of the items were suitable for public auctions, for instance left over military equipment (bullets, military equipment, guns), opium, etc. To take the latter as an example, it was sold through a semi-public auction to a Singapore pharmaceutical firm to make anaesthetics. In the end, part of the proceeds of the auctions went into a Special Revenue Fund to pay the costs of repatriating and restoring the statues.

In this short history and recollection of war, colonies, and former colonies, the bronze statue appears in different images and forms, and its movements and physical transformations form a perfect cycle – from the Japanese occupying Hong Kong and confiscating the statue, melting it down to make weapons to attack and invade other countries, to Japan’s defeat and surrender, the return of the statue to Hong Kong, the Hong Kong government gathering up and auctioning off the things left behind by the Japanese to raise money to restore the statue. At the physical level, this cycle is not just a record of the statue’s travels and the experience of regime change, it is also witness to the transformation of a symbolic representation, and how people face transition.

[…]

In the middle and late stages of the research, I finally obtained some relevant information from the British National Archives. In February 1947, Port Supervisor Mark Young, in a report to the UK Colonial Office, mentioned that the statues had been sent by the UK Liaison Missions from Tokyo back to Hong Kong [4].

 

Restoration – the damaged Queen Victoria statue and the lost blueprint

When the colonial Hong Kong government heard that the statues had been found, they did not take any immediate action. There are always many pressing issues and the return of some statues was not a high priority. According to documents from the UK Colonial Office , one of the main reasons for the delay was that the war had damaged and changed the landscape and buildings of Central District, and it was hoped that this could be an opportunity for another round of urban planning and reclamation works, a proposal for which was submitted to the UK in 1947.

Around this time, the Hong Kong colonial government established a temporary Public Monuments Committee, in conjunction with the Public Works Department and its Architectural Office. The Committee commissioned Raoul Bigazzi, an Italian sculptor who had set up a studio in Central in the 1930s, to research and remake the Queen’s missing pieces.

From the minutes of the Committee’s discussions, when the Queen’s statue was returned from Japan, every part of it had been cut away or damaged to various extents as follows:
1. Orb held in her left hand;
2. The crown on the queen’s head;
3. The sceptre [4];
4. The right arm holding the sceptre;
5. An imperial crown resting on the ornamental pedestal in the centre of the throne;
6. A lion on the throne;
7. A unicorn on the throne;
8. A pair of earrings;
9. A receding panel at the foot of the throne;
10. Two studs;
11. One side panel of the chair.

The Queen Victoria statue was originally designed by Mario Raggi [6], an Italian sculptor living in Portland Place, London, and cast by H. Young and Company, a foundry in Pimlico, before finally being officially unveiled in Hong Kong in 1896. Bigazzi asked the colonial government to ask the UK government for a production blueprint to use as a reference. Unfortunately, the UK government hadn’t had the blueprint even before the war, or it had been destroyed in the Blitz. The Hong Kong government commissioned the UK Ministry of Works to liaise with the sculptor, but in the end Raggi could not be found; according to the National archives, there is no shortage of documents and photos of Raggi’s commissions predating Victoria, so it is very strange that the British government didn’t put any blueprints, sketches, or minutes of any discussions between officials and the sculptor into the archives. The British government then asked the casting workshop for any copies of the blueprint, but unfortunately, the workshop had been destroyed in the Blitz, they’d moved to another location and dropped out of contact. For this reason, the Colonial Office proposed commissioning the Morris-Singer Company, who had cast the statue of George V in Statue Square.

After comparing the Hong Kong and UK archives, I can only conclude that the blueprint is lost, and Bigazzi was working from a number of photos from the UK Public Works Department of the Queen’s statue taken before it had been shipped to Hong Kong, plus his artistic judgement, to produce the new pieces of the statue. In addition, the written descriptions of the damaged portions of the statue in the Hong Kong and UK archives differ. This discrepancy in the historical narrative probably springs from the two regions’ differing images of the statue, as well as speculation by the British government based on similar images of the Queen.

In the middle of 1947, the British and Hong Kong governments assessed the costs and feasibility of the restoration of the statue. The British government asked the Morris-Singer Company for recommendations, and they offered two proposals:
1. Send the statue back to the UK for measurements, so the lost and damaged portions could be recreated in clay, then use the lost wax method to cast new parts, attach them to the statue and make adjustments.
2. Have the Hong Kong sculptor (Bigazzi) make plaster models of the lost and damaged portions, and send them back to the UK for casting.

From an artist’s perspective, the first option is the most appropriate, because the only way to get accurate clay modeling is directly from the statue; if the parts don’t match up exactly, they can be adjusted. The damaged or missing portions of the statue all extend out from the torso, and the ‘wounds’ were not tidy; if plaster casts were made in Hong Kong, and a British sculptor used the models and drawings to make and cast the pieces, it is possible that the pieces wouldn’t be able to join neatly to the main body.

In the end, the Hong Kong government did not pursue either of the above proposals, because the costs of the first proposal exceeded the budget, and the British government was unwilling to pay the full costs, while the feasibility of the second proposal was not guaranteed. Instead, they decided to commission the Hong Kong-based Bigazzi to make models. Regrettably, I have only found the exchanges between Bigazzi and the Hong Kong government at early stage of this process, and have no information to show that the items were cast in Hong Kong. Bigazzi’s studio was in Central, and a foundry for the statue would require sufficient space and ventilation, so I surmise that the government used a third party for casting, which may have been the Morris-Singer Company.

When I read in the files of the twists and turns in the ‘refurbishment’ part of the story, and the circumstances around the files, the order in which they are arranged, I feel that neither the process of ‘refurbishment’, the artist’s imaginings of the statue (in the absence of the original plan, Bigazzi’s individual creativity had to play a role), nor the opinions of officials and the public towards ‘refurbishment’ are adequately recorded. For this reason, in the absence of sufficient information (including the blueprint and the refurbishment documents), I tried to use my own methods to reconstruct the missing pieces.

 


 

[1] HSBC funded the construction of Statue Square and the production of some of the bronze statues in the square before the war.
[2] PAPERS RELATIVE TO AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE SEIZURE OF PROPERTY BY THE JAPANESE IN THE COLONY OF HONG KONG, 18.12.1945, HKRS165-4-1, Hong Kong Government Records Service, Hong Kong.
[3] In 2016, I researched and created a project called The Order of Things, relating to the history and process of public auctions, and the people and objects involved in them. The earliest record in the Hong Kong Archives dealing with public auctions is from 1886, when the Navy received a consignment of goods, and discusses how to convert it into cash through a public auction. Early public auctions usually took the form of public-private partnerships, wherein independent auctioneers were commissioned to conduct the auctions in official or non-official venues. The dates of the auctions were not predetermined, but depended on the quantity of the goods received. After the Handover, the Hong Kong Government Logistics Department has held regular public auctions since 2003. Items auctioned include confiscated and unclaimed goods, and unused tools and goods from various government departments.
[4] Hong Kong: Statue of Queen Victoria, Showing Missing Parts, 1947, CN 3/46, The National Archives, United Kingdom.
[5] According to the archives, during the restoration, the sceptre was possibly modelled on that of King Edward VIII.
[6] Photograph of a plaster cast entitled ‘Compulsory Education. A lady teaching a child, profile view, 2 June 1877, COPY 1/37/322, The National Archives, United Kingdom.

Melancholy and Wishfulness in Historical Records

Melancholy and Wishfulness in Historical Records

Melancholy and Wishfulness in Historical Records:
Lee Kai-chung’s solo exhibition ‘I could not recall how I got here’
[Excerpt]

Text: Vivian TING

 
Hong Kong is a city of amnesia. People would let historical monuments be pushed away by urban development because what they care most about is making a living, resulting in the destruction of relationships and communities built over time. Due to the lack of an archives law, the Hong Kong government has destroyed documents that would have been more than 130,000 metres long if they were lined up. Departments responsible for preserving memories, like the Government Records Service, always show a reluctant attitude towards any requests for archival records because of the official order, trying to draw a veil over their work. If all documents regarding Hong Kong vanish bit by bit, will we be able to recognise ourselves and remember what made Hong Kong the way it is today? What historic events can the archival records tell us about?

The word ‘archive’ connotes all kinds of ‘historic evidence’, including commercial contracts, legal papers, maps, building plans, oral historical records, news videos, three-dimensional architectural models and many more. In archival studies, ‘data’ of various materials and different kinds are sorted, organised and catagorised to preserve the memories frozen in time. The collection, cataloguing and documentation of data must comply with the regulations on work of the institutions they belong to and follow the logic of their academic fields. The attempt to get hold of the past in a disorderly myriad of things could show us the direction that we seem to understand and feel comfortable to move in.

However, a number of archivists point out that during the process of collecting documents, organising and cataloguing information and preserving records, it is not possible for the participants to take an objective stand, and therefore the records that are kept are definitely not conclusive ‘historical facts’ or simply ‘facts’. In recent years, there has been increasing concern about how the general public use the records in archival studies and about how archives have evolved into places dedicated to the production of knowledge and meanings. At the end of the day, if we just store materials and leave them in archives, what we keep is nothing more than meaningless disjointed information and all we have are merely superficially unrelated memories that we cannot probe into.

Lee Kai-chung thrust his head into piles of documents and studied them in an attempt to connect people and stories of different eras and to find out what the past means to us in the present. Sharing a similar aspiration as the historians’, the artist aims to understand the linkage between the past and the present through his study and reshape the narrative around a certain historical event. Nonetheless, he does not follow the practice of historians, who try to get close to the “historical truth” to comprehend the context of things that have changed and of those that have remained the same. The artist is in pursuit of the feeble glimmer of time—the sounds of life, hidden in the gap of time, flowing around the edge between memory and oblivion, unclear and puzzling, and yet implicitly expressing emotions and desires. After all has been said and done, he tries to capture fragments of the old times, recounting in his own artistic language the stories of ordinary people who struggled to survive through times of distress. His solo exhibition ‘I could not recall how I got here’ recollects the vicissitudes of life in wartime Hong Kong by comparing and contrasting the different fates of the Japanese War Memorial and the bronze statues of Queen Victoria in the 1940s, sharing his reflections on how to deal with the times and the collapse and malfunctioning of the system.

[…]

Who do Hong Kong archival records belong to? They certainly do not belong solely to experts, academics or researchers, but to anyone who wants to learn about Hong Kong. Some of these people were born and bred here, some are enthusiastic about the past and the present of this former British colony, and others probe into the intricate history out of astonishment at this city’s strong vitality. Lee’s creation reclaims control over the interpretation of archival documents with his own artistic language, capturing a wider imagination of documents and the history of Hong Kong. He says,
 

‘The “people” from history have disappeared, but the traces they have left behind on the “things” can feed the creative process, because they are the best evidence we have for the existence, speech, and behaviour of the “people”.’

 
Perhaps stories of ordinary people do not matter enough to be written down in history, but the artist believes that everyone’s experience can reflect different aspects of the times and debunks the myths that we have about the past, shaping the established narratives of history. By sorting out documents like historical photos, military papers and posters, he made a three-channel video to look back on how people overcame turmoil and how they understood the times they lived in, through the eyes of a military general from the British garrison in Hong Kong, a Japanese soldier’s wife and a tomb keeper of the Japanese War Memorial. His artwork, developed on the basis of negligible personal feelings and expanding to collective emotions of society, walks the fine line between fiction and reality as it provides alternative ‘historical text’ to discuss the dark age of Hong Kong, which is gradually disappearing into oblivion yet we dare not forget.

The artwork starts with a private letter written by a British army officer. The letter tells of how the secret information of the loss of the Queen’s statues in Japan did not match the local news report. The general had urged the military to open an investigation into the missing statues again and again, but yielded no results and had to let the truth descend into nothing. Indeed, only very few people can call the shots when facing the currents of time. A Japanese soldier’s wife who came to Hong Kong to visit her husband, just had to watch apathetically as her people were gripped by the fever of militarism while surmising the visible and yet unattainable distance to her husband. Left all by herself, she gradually learned to enjoy the cruelty of her surroundings. She would rather be ‘engulfed by the charcoal darkness, and it brought along a sense of intimacy with the fear.’ The keeper of the Japanese War Memorial, who was also living in the darkness, tried to convince himself that time is something that needs to be rapidly depleted. There is nothing wrong with being caught by the Japanese army and forced to perform hard labour; his labour served as proof of his usefulness. Nevertheless, he had no clue about what was worth safeguarding in the tower and could not understand the point of this violence and destruction.

In the past when we read about Hong Kong under Japanese occupation, almost only generalised descriptions like ‘devastation’ and ‘people were living in misery’ were used in the books to describe this dark gloomy period lasting three years and eight months. We still remember Japanese troops slaughtering thousands of civilians, people eating corpses and practising cannibalism due to severe famine. Forests were also cut down and copperware at home was seized as a result of the lack of supplies… And yet the artist chose to depict thoroughly unimportant people who were unable to defy time, contemplating how a single person could find a place in this abnormal world and live a ‘normal’ life despite the collapse of the system. The protagonists in their stories want to seek the truth, or yearn for a loving intimate relationship, or merely get hold of evidence to prove their usefulness. These humble wishes are just normal desires that make humans human, but in tough times they seem impossible and unrealistic. The three stories show the considerable impact society has on an individual’s experience, and it is hard to define what each individual experiences—loss of balance, helplessness, oppression, coldness, confusion and unease—all these cannot be explained by rationality and yet express the individual’s and even community’s emotions of life.

After all, works of art are different from historical accounts. Lee Kai-chung’s work can be taken as a modern-day fable, apart from being seen as an alternative kind of document. Scenes of a stopped clock, of the vast and boundless ocean and of overlapping shadows of flowers flash by in the video and imply that the perception of time varies wildly between individuals. During the passage of time, how are we supposed to make sense of our times?

The war made the Japanese soldier’s wife adapt to difficulties and disrupted the tender moments she had with her husband. She asked a mirror maker to engrave her husband‘s likeness on a mirror so that she could always see his face. However, the soldier had become estranged from her, and she could only wipe her mirror again and again, trying desperately to find the warmth that she used to feel when they were physically close to each other. As the reflection in the mirror replaced reality, what she saw was just an illusion. She no longer had the strength to return to reality and recognise the real situation. It seems that she had walked to the end of her small world even before it began. Just as she said, ‘I thought that flowers wilt slowly. And now I realise, they can die in an instant.’

The intriguing thing is that the tomb keeper read out aloud the newspapers that were still in print to pass his time, coldly watching the violent conflicts between countries. He had been confronted with dead people, seen the brutality and violence happening before him, and suddenly figured out that ‘when a system collapses, there will not be any difference between the good and the bad.’ Once the distinction between right and wrong is eliminated, the immanent order of a civilisation will become meaningless. Perhaps what he could not stand was neither the war nor the loneliness, but the long bleak life in which nothing was worth fighting for.

From the helplessness of the British military officer to the numbness of the tomb keeper and the desolation of the Japanese soldier’s wife, Lee’s video work collects fragments of autocratic violence during the Japanese occupation and of the perplexity of displaced people from his personal disjointed perspective. The monologues of the characters appear to be a chaotic mess, but they reflect the tedious monotone of the historical narratives on Hong Kong under Japanese rule with simple individual voices that penetrate grand narratives of national interests or the global politics. With the use of artistic imagination, the video recollects memories from the past with today’s experiences. So long as the story plots and recurrent scenes can be regarded as allegorical fables, the audience are free to assign contemporary meanings to the work based on how they understand the times and how they use archival materials. Perhaps this is the comfort the artist gives us. Time will pass, whether it is good or bad, but can we stand up for the values we believe in and respond to the challenges of our times? Although the war has been over for a long time, the tangle it created—how to deal with authoritarian oppression and how to comprehend the despair and resistance triggered by violence—is yet to be untied.

To meet the challenges of postmodernism, archival studies gradually shifted from work focusing on searching information to contemplating how to turn archives into sites for producing knowledge and meaning. What is the future for archival studies? Canadian archivist and scholar Terry Cook states:

Postmodernism requires a new openness, a new visibility, a willingness to question and be questioned, a commitment to self-reflection and accountability. Postmodernism requires archivists to accept their own historicity, to recognise their own role in the process of creating archives, and to reveal their own biases. Postmodernism sees value in stories more than structures, the margins as much as the centres, the diverse and ambiguous as much as the certain and universal.

 
The academic profession of archivists has emphasised the systematic collection and organisation of knowledge. In the postmodern era, special attention has been given to reflecting on the logic of the system, different narratives formed based on the data, and even dialogues with communities from different times.

Nevertheless, archival studies belong to communities. The ‘imagination’ that comes with archival records is not just about whether the building of archives involves different participants. Whether the building process can shed light on our thoughts depends more on how the contents of archival records assist readers in discovering the sense and sensibility of civilisations, and on the new interpretations added over time. Lee Kai-chung’s approach of using archival records does not only record stories of Japanese occupation, but also makes known his wishes for the future: searching for diverse voices of historical documents and stretching the imagination of Hong Kong and ourselves in the past. We look for information from the past, most likely because we want to find ourselves and recognition of what we have done. Thrown into a reign of terror, how should Hong Kong people recollect the past? How do we interpret our past to seek motivation to change the present?

Vivian Ting @ Art Appraisal Club
October 2019

The Shadow Lands Yonder (2022)
As Below, So Above (2023)
Publication: No Misery (2022)
Publication: “Sea Sand Home” Timeline
undefined
Publication: Sea Sand Home
Sea Sand Home (2021)
Prelude (2020)
They were There (no.2) (2020)
They were There (no.1) (2020)
Archive of the People (2013-14)
A Meeting Man (2014)
stepbackforward.art (2021-)
Publication: “Things will Work Out Tomorrow- A Growing Collection of StepBackForward Methodologies”
Publication: The [Im]possibility of Art Archives: Theory and Experience in/from Asia (2023)
The (Im)possibility of Art Archives: Theories and Experience in/from Asia (2024)
undefined
The Phantom Archives
The DJ (2013)
The Hikers (2014)
The Port (2014)
HMS Tamar (2014)
I Thought We Talked It Through (2016)
We Hold Empty Names (2016)
I Confess I didn’t (2016)
The Library will Endure (2016)
Casting Bidders (2017)
Catalogue of Catalogue (2017)
From 1 to 5307 (2017)
Dancing with 50 Cents Party (2018)
TV Commercials and Video Tutorials (2018)
archiveme.art website
Publication: “Artist Archives Kit”
The Coffee has Faded, because the Ice has Melted (2019)
Can’t Live Without(2017)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (2017)
Publication: “Can’t Live Without”
The Cold Mountain – film (2022- ongoing)
Loading....

Lee Kai Chung performs artistic research on the entanglement of geopolitics, coloniality and its affective fallout.

In his early years, Lee was inspired by the lack of proper governance over public records, then he develops his archival research methodology as his key artistic practice. Through research, social participation and engagement, Lee’s work resonates with historical narratives, which demonstrates that individual gesture as a transition between politics and art.

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of consecutive practice-led research projects under the theme of Displacement– based on the understanding of human migration and material flow in the shadow of the colonial matrix of power, the projects scrutinise the agency of Displacement, expand the perception of the notion to affective, anachronic, transgenerational and geopolitical aspects of human conditions entangled in Eurasian problematics.

The Mountains and the Phantoms research-based series decipher the political and (post)colonial dimension of the natural environment in East Asia, drawing attention to its presence, self-healing and disaster that could resolve or exacerbate the devastating effects of geopolitical power struggles. The series includes the following projects- Can’t Live Without (2017), For Whom the Bell Tolls (2017), The Cold Mountain (2022-) and The Longing Park (TBC).

Lee’s ongoing research project Archive of the People addresses the political standing of documents and archives in the social setting. In 2016, Lee established the collective ‘Archive of the People’, which serves as an extension of his personal research to collaborative projects, education and publications.

In collaboration with curator Shen Jun, Lee founded stepbackforward.art and The Phantom Archives in 2020 and 2022 respectively: the former is an online platform collecting artist archives, fragmented thoughts and artist methodology; the latter extends Lee’s Displacement series to a public domain, constituting an online archives that embraces public participation.

Lee was awarded the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts Southeast England (CHASE) doctoral studentships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the 18th Busan International Video Art Festival  <Selection 2024> prize in 2024; Honourable Mention in Sharjah Biennial 15 and Taoyuan International Art Award respectively in 2023; The Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University in 2022, he received Altius Fellowship from Asian Cultural Council in 2020; the annual Award for Young Artist (Visual Arts) from Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2018, and WMA Commission (Transition) in 2017.

Keywords:
Coloniality, Affect, Displacement, Artistic Research, Archives

e: kaiclee13@gmail.com