Papers by Linda Chiu-han Lai
Presencing the past, a montage experience: walking through a series of temporal nodes
This is Hong Kong (art catalogue), Jul 4, 2009
This is a text on Linda Lai's video work "Non-place, Other Space" (2009) by Venus Lau and Robin P... more This is a text on Linda Lai's video work "Non-place, Other Space" (2009) by Venus Lau and Robin Peckham, writer and editor of the catalogue for the traveling video showcase THIS IS HONG KONG (2009) curated by Alvaro Fominaya-Rodriguez for Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong. For Linda Lai's artist's narrative on the work for other locations, please refer to: https://silentspeecheslai.blogspot.com/2011/06/non-place-other-space-sight-and-sound.html
Artist's narrative: Non-place ▪ Other Space is part of my continuous fuelled interest in found footage and compilation works, also an auto-ethnographic practice. I have been a fervent walker of the city as well as a detached collector of sights and sounds. Most of the outdoor sites in this work no long exist in current maps of Hong Kong, or they have never existed as practical, concrete dwellings as they were only impermanent sights of artistic installations. Video-making then is to renew the old images that filled my archive, also to preserve the fragments for their own autonomy and openness for signification. In Walter Benjamin’s light, “the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”
Object-Subjectivities: a Techno-Art Saga (an interactive digital chronology)
Hong Kong In-Between": Two videos on liminal spaces
Non-place, Other Space" at Urban Nomadism 2017, Hangzhou Liangzhu: Big Roof Motion Picture Exhibition (Hong Kong Section)
DOOR GAMES, WINDOW FRAMES (single-channel version) at "China Remixed Initiative," video art exhibition at The Media School of Indiana University
MEDIA X MUMM, Art Central 2017, Mar 20, 2017
The content is a wall text placed at the entrance of the MEDIA X MUMM video-film area at Art Cent... more The content is a wall text placed at the entrance of the MEDIA X MUMM video-film area at Art Central 2017, written by Linda Chiu-han Lai as her curatorial introduction for the year's selection. The text is posted on Art Notes on the website of Floating Projects, video program collaborator with Art Central for that year, introducing the principles of selection, with special attention to recent trends in videography that moves towards other media, followed by detailed descriptions of the gallery-represented individual works, highlighting as well the celluloid film projection works of Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo.
Micro Narratives: A Visual Poem" (Experimental Video) at Korean Film Archive
At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, 2001
Citation info: "Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering," anthologized in A... more Citation info: "Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering," anthologized in At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther C.M. Yau, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 231-50.
Taking up the widely discussed topic of nostalgia, in “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering,” Linda Lai sees nostalgia mingled with a sense of local community and faith in modern progress. Collective memories of history and everyday experiences become intertwined with the history of popular culture in a process Lai calls “enigmatization.” “Enigmatization” in this sense means reorganizing existing pop culture images to select the local audience as a distinct, privileged interpretative community. Understanding this imagery distinguishes those within from those “outside” by marking as special those viewers who share a similar pop culture history. Lai uses “enigmatization” as a theoretical trope to examine the phenomenon of how Hong Kong cinema deals with identity. She draws on numerous films — Peter Chan’s He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father! (1993), Derek Yee’s "C'est la vie, mon cheri" (1993), Clifton Ko's "I Will Wait for You" (1994), Umbrella Stories (1995) and Mad Phoenix (1997), and more, followed by a detailed discussion of Stephen Chiau's logic of nonsense whereby he interweaves cultural lampoon and the archiving of disappearing folk-pop cultural practices and conditioned mentalities. Nostalgia, then, is taken up by Lai as far more than a sentimental looking back or yearning for what is about to lose, but a critical node that links sentiments with concrete practices in cinema and different forms of performative narrativity.
Duke University Press eBooks, Mar 28, 2007
Grounded in a conviction to make sense of the city, its materiality as well as visuality, and a c... more Grounded in a conviction to make sense of the city, its materiality as well as visuality, and a commitment to everyday creativity, flânerie and other forms of spatial practices are known subversive tactics against alienation in urban life in the West. But when these categories become sheer metaphors, or realized as textual strategies, the critical power of material engagement with everyday urbanity subsides. Such is my critical discussion of several films in my essay. One group is Huang Jianxin’s “urban attitude” trilogy. The second group includes the works of Zhang Ming, Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye, which form a trajectory of independent filmmaking that challenges the reductive label of the ‘6th Generation’ Chinese filmmakers. I describe specifically what I call ‘negative poetics’, an aesthetic method that at once embodies the excuse to show the new face of Chinese cities, through characters drift aimlessly, and the desire to align with Modernist strategies that mark art-house cinema practices in the West.
Redes Ocultas: Imagen en Movimiento y Visión Artificial
Redes Ocultas: Imagen en Movimiento y Visión Artificial, Jul 3, 2021
In search of a sculptural dialectics: moving image, a materialist, intermedia game
3 video works -- Diaries: Dry Rain, No Path but My Footprints and Doors Medley -- at the 22nd Traverse Video Edition 2019: Art Video & Experimental
WMC_e6: Cinema Expanding: Visualising the Unseen
Doors Medley" in Traverse Video's traveling showcase at Aveyron
La Casa 3: The Apartments (v. 2)
Art Reader 1, Sep 1, 2019
The paper is the revised, written version of a talk the author delivered for a seminar series by ... more The paper is the revised, written version of a talk the author delivered for a seminar series by ART READER, a research project fully funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council with a book publication as its ultimate deliverable. This piece is bi-lingual, originally written in English and translated by the editorial team. Speaking from the author's subject positions as a media culture historian, an art educator with a Critical Theory orientation, and as an artist who cares about grounding, she tactical location is the moving images and all connected tissues and networks, institutional and techno, specific knowledge domains, existential instincts, and personal callings, aspirations and desires, doubts and questions of survival, and the dialectical relations of these different planes and moments. She draws from Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “pharmakon” and “general organology” to establish my tactical practice in moving image. An organological approach offers an expansive map showing moving images occupying the interstitial – between epochs, generations, between dream and awakening, representation and knowledge, control and enlightenment, and between consumerist marketing activities and artistic creation, which is supposed to be a realm of progressive thinking. Moving image is “pharmakon” – its drugs as much as cures. In this sense, the author is not just a stake-holder in art, but also a (re-)grounder who seeks change and transformation. What kind of re-grounding? Re-defining ontological questions of art; ensuring a dialogical model; re-enlivening our sensual, cognitive-perceptual experience; re-activating the audience; opening up the meaning of art; engaging critically with the question of why preserving the autonomy of art is important and what that means... the author uses accessible examples from my practice to illustrate my self-examination.
Door Games Window Frames: Near Drama" at "Hong Kong – Tales of the City" with webinar participation in a moderated seminar
[solo] Mnemonic Archiving: a Dispersive Monument HK
Threshold Crossing: the Cartographic Imaginary
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Papers by Linda Chiu-han Lai
Artist's narrative: Non-place ▪ Other Space is part of my continuous fuelled interest in found footage and compilation works, also an auto-ethnographic practice. I have been a fervent walker of the city as well as a detached collector of sights and sounds. Most of the outdoor sites in this work no long exist in current maps of Hong Kong, or they have never existed as practical, concrete dwellings as they were only impermanent sights of artistic installations. Video-making then is to renew the old images that filled my archive, also to preserve the fragments for their own autonomy and openness for signification. In Walter Benjamin’s light, “the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”
Taking up the widely discussed topic of nostalgia, in “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering,” Linda Lai sees nostalgia mingled with a sense of local community and faith in modern progress. Collective memories of history and everyday experiences become intertwined with the history of popular culture in a process Lai calls “enigmatization.” “Enigmatization” in this sense means reorganizing existing pop culture images to select the local audience as a distinct, privileged interpretative community. Understanding this imagery distinguishes those within from those “outside” by marking as special those viewers who share a similar pop culture history. Lai uses “enigmatization” as a theoretical trope to examine the phenomenon of how Hong Kong cinema deals with identity. She draws on numerous films — Peter Chan’s He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father! (1993), Derek Yee’s "C'est la vie, mon cheri" (1993), Clifton Ko's "I Will Wait for You" (1994), Umbrella Stories (1995) and Mad Phoenix (1997), and more, followed by a detailed discussion of Stephen Chiau's logic of nonsense whereby he interweaves cultural lampoon and the archiving of disappearing folk-pop cultural practices and conditioned mentalities. Nostalgia, then, is taken up by Lai as far more than a sentimental looking back or yearning for what is about to lose, but a critical node that links sentiments with concrete practices in cinema and different forms of performative narrativity.