“Meditations on a Minor History” Part 1  
VOICES SEEN, IMAGES HEARD (中文版)
2009, 28 minutes

screening record / citations / my writings on this work [English][Chinese中文]


Victoria Harbour battleship
image04 botanical-garden


"So much of what really 'counts' to people in our society goes on in secret."

(J. Douglas, "Existential Sociology")

 

《史耕、吃茶、翻舊帳》Part 1 / 第一部: 看得見的聲音,聽得見的形象

11.2009 / Hong Kong / 27m 58s / PAL / aspect ratio 3:4 / color + b/w / Stereo sound

A Linda Lai video

Synopsis
A historian, also an interdisciplinary artist, engages in a self-dialogue of how to write the history of her city, Hong Kong. Drilling the disparate mines of sights and sounds, she re-examines the power and limitation of ocular epistemology, which favors visual perception as the dominant form of knowing. As she makes her way through the scanty and homogenous visual documents available, she re-imagines a city that has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity at the interest of real estate development. In response, she re-constructs a visual essay that is also a collage of lost surfaces and shadowy fragments of existence. Her meditation leaves open the potential meanings of each of the sight-and-sound fragments that seem to have spoken to her, asking how feasible it is to access the past.


Artist’s Statement  
Voices Seen, Images Heard is a work of experimental visual historiography based on visual ethnography. I have always been an earnest image-collector – photos, newsreels, movies with real location shots, drawings, found texts and graphics.  I attend especially to the less noticeable details of these found objects, and I realize there’s a lot to the ‘surfaces’ of things handed down to us from the past. I naturally find collage a powerful artistic form and strategy, and have adapted it to videography.  In the process of it, one intriguing creative problem is how to embed still images in a video work; the other is what to do with available fragments that do not immediately form a rational whole.  What I have done in Voices Seen is to liberate the fragments of found sounds and images from the domination of discourses, juxtapose them with my own video diaries, to let each fragment speak and perform to us.
 
Voice is the first of a series meditation notes in the form of video essays on the thought process of a historian attempting to re/un-cover the lost sights and sounds of a city whose ‘appearances’ constantly ‘disappear’ by the logic of progress and development.  I have been driven by a strong desire to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ for myself… What did people look like? Who walks on the street? How did they talk? What did they sound like?  In the light of phenomenological thinking, I highlight the historian’s desire to gain access to, and the impossibility of sensual perceptual dwelling in the past -- even in the presence of a huge archive! The irony is – a lot of the Cantonese sounds I’ve found are not comprehensible to me. I look at them and listen – much like a stranger in the midst of a foreign tongue.
 

====================
 
Researched, written, photographed and edited by Linda C.H. LAI
Programming Artist (animation): Hector RODRIGUEZ SUAREZ
Research Assistant: Wendy TAI, Jolene MOK
 
This project is partially funded by the School of Creative Media’s Strategic Research Grant at the City University of Hong Kong.
 
========================
Cited works:
Archive footage permitted by Getty Image – footage by Bollenbacher-Berge and Hongkong Government public service announcements and newsreels.
 
Vintage still photos are paid Xeroxed copies of original stills at the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Hong Kong Government’s Public Records.
 
Found feature-length motion pictures include:
              Hong Kong Nights (E. Mason HOPPER, 1934 / USA)
              The Imp 凶榜 (aka Xiong bang; Dennis YU, 1981 / Hong Kong)
              Visible Secret 幽靈人間 (aka Youling renjian; Ann HUI, 2001 / Hong Kong)
              The Eye 見鬼 (aka Gin gwai; Oxide PANG, Danny PANY, 2002 / Hong Kong)
              Chungking Express 重慶森林 (WONG Kar-wai, 1994 / Hong Kong)
              All of a Sudden 驚變 Herman YAU, 1996 / Hong Kong)
              Blossom in Rainy May 五月雨中花 (QIN Jian, 1960 / Hong Kong)

 

***********************************************************

[Screening history/record]

*April 8-15, 2010. 12th International Women's Film Festival in Seoul (WFFIS) - "Transmediascape" program. Seoul, South Korea.

**April 23-29, 2010. Athens International Film & Video Festival 2010. Athens, Ohio, USA.

***July 17, 2010. Xindanwei新單位, Shanghai
****September 1-7, 2010. "EX-NOW" (international competition), EXiS 2010 (Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul), Korea [citation...]
*****November 25-28, 2010. EX!T 2010 - Experimental Media Art Festival in Taipei.
******February 18, 2011. 'The Other: Hong Kong Experimental Shorts' program (別樣:香港實驗短片), curated by Phoebe Man, at Videotage (Cattle Depot, artists' village), Hong Kong.

*******November 27-29, 2011. KLEX (Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film & Video Festival) 2011 [...] in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, South Korea.
********December 9, 2011 - January 9, 2012. One World Exposition. Videotage. Osage-Kwun-tong, Hong Kong.
*********December 11, 2011. EXiM 2011 (Asian Experimental Video Festival in Macao 亞洲實驗影像活動) [...] in the program "Second-hand Material Original Works : Hong Kong Experimental Shorts" (二手料、原創片:香港實驗短片) curated by Phoebe Man [...], Macao.
***********19 July 2017. EXiS 2017 - as part of Linda Lai's solo screening in INDI-VISUAL, Korean Film Archive, Seould, Korea

[Academic presentation]

November 5-6, 2010. Presented at Everyday Coloniality, International Workshop-conference attended by 13 historians, organized by the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture, sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea. This video work is also the subject matter of Professor Alf Lüdtke's presentation in the conference. [read paper]

[Citations]

ASPECT (the Chronicle of New Media Art) volume 18 (fall, 2011), "Export China"; commentary by Kimburley Choi.

"A historian, also an interdisciplinary artist, engages in a self-dialogue of how to write the history of her city, Hong Kong. Drilling the disparate mines of sights and sounds, she re-examines the power and limitation of ocular epistemology, which favors visual perception as the dominant form of knowing. As she makes her way through the scanty and homogenous visual documents available, she re-imagines a city that has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity at the interest of real estate development." (program notes, Athens International Film+Video Festival 2010)

"A historian, also an interdisciplinary artist, engages in a self-dialogue of how to write the history of her city, Hong Kong. Drilling the disparate mines of sights and sounds, she reexamines the power and limitation of ocular epistemology, which favors visual perception as the dominant form of knowing." (synopsis, 12th International Women's Film Festival in Seoul 2010)

"Voices Seen, Images Heard is an alternative historiography written in the form of visual ethnography and travelogue. The director tries to write the history of Hong Kong with a variety of her collections including photos, paintings, movies, and newsreels, but these visual materials contrastingly distract our understanding about Hong Kong. The location of, a Hollywood movie which pictures Hong Kong people in a ridiculous manner, is not Hong Kong but Shanghai. Visual materials have great effect in understanding a country, but none of the visual materials about Hong Kong here show Hong Kong as it is. Maybe, being torn apart and scattered, those materials per se are the history of Hong Kong which was returned to China after 100 years of English occupation. The director says Hong Kong is the fragments that are secretive, fragile, and distorted." (CHO Hye-young, programmer's notes, 12th International Women's Film Festival in Seoul 2010)

"...were fascinated by your film "Voices Seen, Images Heard". I liked every facet and truly enjoyed your stubborness in elegantly inviting (and tempting) the audience to entertain the notion that there does not exist a ("one") story we just can or have to unearth: truly excellent! " (-- Prof. Alf Luedtke, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, College of Humanities, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea)

"Her work...has shown a searching process, aimed to redefine the city 'Hong Kong' which is a term having too many cliches. She abandoned those discourses that people already have and went back to the basic, collecting daily fragments and facts to induce new concepts of Hong Kong. The approach is humane and inspiring." (--Phoebe Man, "Hong Kong Screeing: The Other," in the proceedings of EX!T 2010, Experimental Media Art Festival in Taiwan, p. 24)

Jane Chung 钟瑾, Xinmin Weekly no. 19《新民周刊》2011年第19期(5月16-22日) (Shanghai): "影像——想象香港的第N种方法" [Images: the nth way to imagine Hong Kong] (16-22.05.2011 / 文化版 culutral page) [link to full essay in Chinese...]

[My writings on the work]

A written interview I did with Shanghai's Yishu shijie (Art World) in July 2010 [......]

An exposition on the work for an academic conference on historiography [......]

 

《史耕、吃茶、翻舊帳》Part 1 / 第一部: 看得見的聲音,聽得見的形象

| 本事 |

一個歷史作者,也是跨界藝術家,用兩個身分進行自我對話,尋根究底,要弄清楚該如何去書寫自家城市香港的歷史。她勘鑽零星散落的聲、影礦庫,重新檢視以視覺為憑據的知識論 -即以“看見”作為“知道”的主要來源的哲學論點 - 的威力與局限。遍閱分佈各處卻類同的搜羅得來的視覺材料,她意圖重新想象她的香港。從市容風貌、文物保育的角度來看,這個香港擁有著流離不穩定的歷史,在地產發展等同社會發展的邏輯下,它不斷被“毀容”再被“整容”;若歷史要寄存於建築實體才能為人民盛載歷史記憶的話,那香港人恐怕都要失憶了。歷史/藝術家的回應,一起步就超越了收復、重構的囹圄;她寧願往“碎片”的開發作為策落,張開碎片的獨立性、自主性,強調影像碎片的“表層”,按其外觀的特質進行抽象拚貼,繼而作成既展示、描繪,也說明、議論,以電影詩學為陳述軌跡的錄像散文。展示觀者面前的,是真實存在過的‘此時此刻’,逼真,卻鬼魅婆娑。每一個碎片誘發著無窮的待發的潛在意義,向著歷史/藝術家招手,而她,就闊然站立於現在,站在過往的邊緣,擁抱過去可觸及卻未必能再現的狀況,策問:歷史如何參透?

| 藝術家陳述 |

〈看得見的聲音,聽得見的形象〉是一部以視覺民俗誌學為基礎的實驗性的視覺史學論的作品。我一直是個辛勤的影像收集者,照片、新聞片、老電影中的地方實景、畫作、現成的文字或圖像檔案,碰到的我都會收集,然後在其中尋找那些微細的小節,在明顯的主題重點以外找出存活的證據、無聲的意義。我發現,“過去”留給我們的,雖然都是僅可在那些檔案碎片的表層可偵索的資訊,卻無窮盡,看不完,用不盡。在眾多的美學策略當中,我覺得“拚貼”是最貼設不過的形式,因為它在方法上強調現成物的表層,具有顛覆、玩弄的意義;而我,就以拚貼作為錄像書寫的基本文法。在尋找香港過去的影像資料的過程中,由於找到硬照較多,於是自然而來的難題解決就是如何把不會動的照片變為會動的影話戲。另一個同樣吃重的問題是,現成找來的材料本身不一定連成系統,或帶任何因果邏輯關係,如何把四方八面、指向不同的材料放進同一個敘事體?我的解決方法是,釋放眾聲片和影像碎片,讓它們不再從屬於論述才能供人辨識,也把我個人的錄像日記混進去,讓個別的碎片給我們顯顏色,向我們演本領。

〈看得見的聲音〉是我的影像歷史默想沈思系列的第一本,為了對過去的可索可追而無法客觀整合重現的一種態度上的積極的確立。一個不斷整容,過往面貌消失淨盡,向來缺乏文化物質保留的香港,成為以經驗為本的史論的一項特殊考題。出路可能在於現象學的思維方向 - 就是不能察看全景,觸及根基結構,也希望片斷地用耳聽得見,用眼看得到。她們是甚麼模樣的?街道上有那些人在走路?他們說話的聲音是怎樣的?談的是甚麼?過去的時空無法佔據,音容卻仍可撩動我們的感官思維;這是活動影像作兼攬的特性。我聽著找回來的三十年代的廣東聲帶,興致勃勃,越聽就越覺得自己像外人,模不著頭腦。

| 訪問/評論 |

上海《藝術世界》電子文字訪問 [......] (2010年7月)

文晶瑩(“別樣:香港實驗短片” 策展人)
“黎肖嫻...的作品...是一段重新探索’香港‘的過程,一層層的剝去種種附加在這個城市上的陳腔濫調,將日常中的細節再度抽絲剝繭,希望能尋回屬於’香港‘最初最新的定義 。這個做法相當發人深省。”( 台灣國際實驗媒體藝術展暨亞洲論壇特刊,23頁)

钟瑾, 〈影像——想象香港的第N种方法〉,上海《新民周刊》2011年第19期(5月16-22日)文化版。[閱讀網上版全文...]

 

IMAGES

One World Exposition (Osage-Kwun Tong, a Videotage exhibition) 2011.12

Site audience-watching
video-view setting-up