Victoria, Tentatively (2017-22)

Single-channel video, 12’52”.

Comprising:

Daily Routine (2017). An 110-min performance. Hong Kong.

Nth Dimension (2018). Mixed-media performance collaborating with Noah Lawson (Composer), ANIMA (Ensemble) & Elden Tse (Engineer). Oxford.

Time Factory (2018). A 60-min mixed-media performance collaborating with choreographer Fung Sze Chit. Hong Kong.

Time has never been settled in post-colonial Hong Kong, even its raison d’être Victoria Harbour seems to be a namesake debt. The slipperiness of temporality is accentuated in this experimental short through its complicity between a dance documentary and a dance film. In its very own time-image form, this film concluded the series of attempts from the artist to visualise a plurality of abstract time conditions (waiting, spectating, rehearsing, performing) against uncertain moments of the city.

Further project description:

This is a trilogy of work revolving around the notion of time. Starting with a durational performance piece, Daily Routine (2017), the artist rolled a pseudo-clock sculpture along the largest avenue in Hong Kong’s business hub in an attempt to spark a stream of surreal urban imagery and the subsequent imagination.

Using the voices of over 75 people from across the globe, Nth Dimension (2018) is a collaborative research-based work that attempts to initiate an artistic synthesis of spacetime, an imagined universe where the visible is defined by sound and the abstract is confronted by reality. It was performed live by the ANIMA Ensemble, when half of the ensemble were asked to count 1 minute using their own voices, while the other half were asked to count using their instruments (Cello, Violin, Flute, Harp), in response to the edited video-sound piece .The resulting audio track was then edited and visualised using the engineering programme, 'Gammatonegram'.

A dance choreographer in Hong Kong was subsequently invited to respond to the first two episodes with new choreography, resulting in the multimedia performance, Time Factory (2018). In an attempt to disable the rigid perception of time grounded quantitatively and scientifically in the conventional sense, the event was displaced to its location within Victoria Harbour, a site carrying an intense nostalgia of Hong Kong’s deceased colonial history. The audience was required to take a primitive sampan to reach the floating barge in the middle of the dark sea for the performance. A total audience of 120 attended the two-night event, each comprising performance and social occasion.