Hong Kong is a city of tomorrow, while heritage preservation has become an inherent part of its renewal agenda… Intersection brings progression and retrogression together, as well as competing conceptions and conflicting values under one-roof, which amazingly hinges on our urgent existence in an era embedded with the many cultural fault lines…
Intersection is a concurrent project title of Prague Quadrennial 2011-12 and INTERSECTION is an exhibition platform of MOST, which presents two independent exhibitions with two sets of artwork including photography, literature, painting, video, electronic media, music, sound effects and light installation co-existing at the same time and intersecting on the same curatorial platform, time and space in Hong Kong out of coincidences.
Deriving from the concepts of Intersection, a novella (1972) by Hong Kong’s veteran literary writer Liu Yichang, the curatorial platform is a novel idea of putting up exhibits without discursive dialogue as a strategy to re-examine the minute changes of Hong Kong as well as the illusion/ delusion of cultural x/ change between the cross-strait three regions. This project also provides a visual structure to review the openness and repercussions of cultural recreation unique to Hong Kong and offers enriching dimensions to the field of curatorial practice.
Liu’s Intersection reflects a state of cultural quality of Hong Kong which is filmic, visual with elements mutually synchronizing, contradictory, fragmentary, exclusive, but all-embracing. With the story set in the early 1970s of Hong Kong using a novel style of non-narrative, free association and parallel plotlines, the novella Intersection narrates two characters having no connection — an old man reminiscing the past and a young girl appealing to the future — and their psychos and footprints in the city. By portraying the two post-war generations of Hong Kong from an angle of aimless flâneurs, Liu’s storyline is a legacy of Hong Kong’s culture. The story context of Wong Kar-wai’s film “In the Mood for Love” is partly inspired by Intersection; the original text of the novella is also adapted directly into the film for creating new identity (Stuart Hall, Cultural identity and Diaspora, p.223). The quality of Intersection is no longer confined to literature or specific languages. Just as what Wong Kar-wai has pointed out in the photo book of Tête-bêche — In the Mood for Love: “Tête-bêche is not just a philatelic term or novel writing style; it could also be the film language, the intersection of light and color, sound and images.”
Seven people, exploring the notion of times, encounter each other in a spark of memory. These multimedia art exhibitions, titled Intersection, are without doubt a cross-media match of doubles. Published in 1972, Liu’s novella Intersection has the same historical background as Hong Kong’s cottage industry of the 1970s. As the exhibitions are to be launched in the former Shek Kip Mei Factory Building—JCCAC—where the new cultural industry does not necessarily bear any relation with the cottage works, the exhibitions respond to the symbolic meaning of intersection. The concepts of intersection and parallel development also reveal the state of cultural ecology in JCCAC Art Village and the broader Hong Kong, which is again one of ambivalence and distance and this mythical condition, is characterized by the lack of conversation, inbreeding in snail-shell cubicles, and delusion of self-development among the JCCAC or Hong Kong artists. Just like Liu’s Intersection, a series of parallel coincidence and contingencies in different arts fields of Hong Kong leads to these two independent exhibitions.
Exhibition Context
Exhibition I to be held in the Gallery on the first floor includes the unrelated works by two pairs of creative producers. One is the photography of literature comprising of Thomas Lin and Liu Yichang’s “Tête-bêche, Era”. Inspired by Intersection, Thomas Lin made a series of upside-down images, picturing the forgotten living scenes, and declining humanistic activities: “I attempted to use inverted lens of camera to capture upside-down images in order to revert those reversed values.” In his new work, “Tête-bêche, Era”, as a tribute, Thomas Lin employed the unique words of the stream-of-consciousness writings of Liu Yichang to kindle memories, experimenting the counterforce that overturns the times. “To observe, and even to think using this indirect image,” said Thomas, “I find two coexisting worlds at the extremes. This is surprisingly contradictory!”
The reality is also an “Intersection”. Just as Thomas Lin and Liu Yichang started their conversation, the other side finds a sound interactive installation, “Where Memories Go — Tino the Elephant”, by George Ho and Tats Lau, who were having a discussion related to memory coincidently. “The post-60s recognizes me as a musician”, said Tats Lau, “while the post-80s calls me the Abbot, Wet Dreams” This remark of Tats Lau ascertains the creative direction of George Ho in a production of an interactive installation exploring the faulted layer of collective memory.
Originated from his own childhood memory, George Ho made use of layers of wood boards to put together his work, “Where Memories Go — Tino the Elephant”. George recalled, “My mum brought me to Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park to feed that elephant; she said if you feed it sincerely, it would remember you forever.” With the passing away of the elephant and the disappearance of the park, this myth was embedded in mind under the faulted layer of times. George believes that the experimental sounds by Tats Lau contain a psychic archeological power. “Touching the nose of the elephant in front of this elephant installation, it will then tell you this secret. If this elephant remembers you, then this is the unique installation which helps to uncover memories,” George said.
Another unrelated exhibition project to be held at the Central Courtyard of the JCCAC Art Village and on the zero floor contains the works of multi-media artist daDa (with composer Vincent Pang) and architect Haynie Sze.
daDa’s exhibition titled RockBeing/ BeingRock presents the distorted human life course that resembles the roughness, primitivism and lack of embellishment of rocks. He feels that “humans are retrogressing back to rocks: even till today’s industrial and Info/ Techno modern society, which contributes to an egocentric and non-communicative environment. Humans are transcended into matter immersing with estrangement, solitude, nothingness, anxiety and absurdity, and become heartless and ruthless with retrogression to ‘crawling animals’ or ‘rock-like features’. Humans become worthless, empty and surrounded by anxiety in an irrational and meaningless world. Living in “the confused” now, one could only hope for better days to come.”
Haynie Sze’s work “New Chinese Landscape Series ‘the Way We Live,’” is a spatial piece at the Central Courtyard in response to Liu’s Intersection. Sze examines the living of urban habitants in terms of the notions of “my city”, “my house”, “five hundred ft”, “five stars”, “flat”, “cave”, “snail-shell-sized home” and “everydayness”. By placing “intersected” domestic furniture pieces in front of daDa’s smoky and electronic container installation, titled “Preserved Chinese Landscape 40ft x 8ft x 8ft Standard Container”, she reveals nowadays' distorted living concept of our home land, and showing how this has become the ironic yet common 'living landscape' of city dwellers under the globalized market boom of real estate.
“Two stamps are opposite and connected to each other; they have no meanings resided if separated.” This epilogue written by Liu Yichang for Tête-bêche, at the same time, could act as notation for the seven people encountered in this parallel, self-exploratory journey of Hong Kong around and through history and times…
