Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Regarding your creations, you have once said that you like to show the strange aspect of people’s lives. Currently, what strange elements of reality are you interested in?

When I use the word “strange” to describe my work, I usually mean “strange moments” or, at times, strange human experiences. That goes hand in hand with my interest in consciousness. These “strange moments” are like gaps that enable us to fly away to anothertime and space, to experience something that may have happened (memory/remembrance) or will happen (in the future/expectation/desire). All of that relates to our consciousness. I am not certain whether this understanding is very different from that of Western psychology. To me, all of that is mixed up, and is useful in order to explain that whichexists around us. Gathering and editing/pasting images is like holding on to a glimpse of thoughts among the millions or billions that we have over the course of one day, andthen presenting and sharing them with people that can be touched by the emotions that the images bear. 

Industrialized food, technology, and impersonal places are obsessive presences in your work. Why is that?

For an urban person such as myself, coming from a city like Hong Kong, finding innerpeace is a lifelong task. The structure of the cities and the goods that surround us confine the limits of the quantity and quality of “tools” that may enable us to liberate ourselves from everyday life. In the end, they place us on a path that is far removed from that of abandoning something, and lead us to return to that from which we wish to free ourselves. This contrast is one of the issues that I am interested in exploring. Perhaps it even describes my type of surrealism, a way of detaching myself from what is common. 

You are one of the leading names among artists working with video and performance inHong Kong. How have these media changed over the course of the last decade?

If I am one of the leading names, I guess that it is because I am one of a few who continue to create in this field. Maybe like everywhere else in the world, the interactive arts have become the most popular; at the other end of the spectrum are literature and the dramatic arts. When television sets and LED panels started being installed in any corner of Hong Kong, the image-saturated city became the city saturated by moving images. Reaching beyond moving graphisms, it seems to me that many people have already noticed that there is something called video painting and image flow. It is just a lot of waste of images, I think. By definition, they all belong in the same category, unfortunately (if we do not take aesthetic quality into account).

You were the director of Videotage, a Hong Kong-based organization turned to the development of video and new media work. You have also directed the Microwave Festival. Why have you abandoned those activities?

I believe that they have helped me a lot, and now I think it is time to start something different. As I said before, I live in a real media-heavy city. In these surroundings, I would like to find more interesting ways of letting art find its way to technologies, and of having the younger people understand what is really going on around them, in a context in which everything needs to be marketed and packed.

In addition to being an artist, you are also a teacher. What are your main concerns when creating and when teaching someone? Do these activities converge at some point?

I teach two different types of students, even though they all may be called art students. Some of them are fine arts students and others are electronic art students. They have very different quality standards, based on the very different values that they have about art and technology. It is not easy to make them all comfortable in order to experiment with the elements that I want them to try. Experimenting is very important, be it involving the eyes and ears only, or including all of the senses. This is the means for connecting artistic elements with what we already have inside ourselves. When we feel touched (emotionally) or attuned (conceptually), we connect ourselves with the artwork. We are all aware of the fact that anything can be turned into an artwork, or that any method may yield an artistic process. I want my students to be able to recreate the type of process/experience that they want to offer to their audiences. Thus, they must understand what they are doing. The same way as I have audiences experience my glimpse of thoughts. 

China is currently the world’s third-largest economy. Is this in any way influencingthe way of making, showing, and reflecting about art in Hong Kong?

I think that being asked questions such as that one is one of the things that artists from Hong Kong are going through. Not that it is a negative or positive thing. The people in Hong Kong need to know this greater China somehow, even though this is not a part of the education that my generation received. Ever since my secondary school years, themes pertaining to the year of 1997 [when Hong Kong went back to being controlled by China] have made the newspaper headlines. Now the question is how to prevent Hong Kong from being marginalized. China is quite strong, in both the good and bad senses, and it influences Hong Kong—a “global city in Asia,” as the local government proclaims—in every aspect.

What projects are you working on right now?

I have been interested in researching and elaborating work focusing on the culture of East Asia ever since the time when I did research in Japan. The violent cultural changesbrought about by modernization or Westernization (I am not referring to wars, but rather to the reasons that allowed wars to happen) led people in East Asia to view their owncultures in a very interesting way. I would like to use the flower as the object that reflects the changes that took place over the course of these years. I do not have a specific date in which to present this work, I am gathering images and researching. Perhaps it will be more along the lines of an essay.