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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.
