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Nadim Abbas, Rose Li, Edward Sanderson (with Fiona Lee Wing-shan), Lang Tu (with Anouchka van Driel)

FoMO FREE RADIO


fomo4free.tumblr.com

Short-circuiting the attention economy
To counteract the tyranny of the social
Holistic remedies for ZOOM fatigue
Modalities of listening/ambience
Performativity in-and-of virtual spaces
A workshop on doing nothing
Parasitical programs
Mining the political diseconomy of uselessness
Purposive entertainment without purpose

 

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fomo4free.tumblr.com (screenshot), 2021.

fomo4free.tumblr.com (screenshot), 2021.

 

TU Lang, SLACKER'S LOVE, 2021, Livestream at FoMO Radio, Photography by screenshot livestream


TU Lang, SLACKER'S LOVE, 2021, Livestream at FoMO Radio, Photography by screenshot livestream

TU Lang, SLACKER'S LOVE, 2021, Livestream at FoMO Radio, Photographies by screenshots livestream

  

TU Lang, SLACKER'S LOVE, 2021, Livestream at FoMO Radio, Photography by screenshot livestream

TU Lang, SLACKER'S LOVE, 2021, Livestream at FoMO Radio, Photography by Nadim Abbas scene shoot

 

Tu Lang (TL): Thank you so much for the presentation, Anouchka. It is really funny to see the fashion film of Windowsen; it is a super rising up brand not only in China but all over the world. I can see the fashion industry of China nowadays is more and more active and interesting. It is tough to say that raising some difficulties and problems, like sometimes mentioned about China design, is to think about shanzhai (山寨 ). However, there are still many Chinese creative fashion designers presenting. What’s your favorite Chinese fashion brand?

Anouchka van Driel (AvD): Let me comment a little bit first, I agree with you, especially within fashion design which is part of my research. I have been aggregating a list of all the designers that I have come across. In the research review discussion I had today, we came upon the idea to add a timeline to that essential list, and what you see is that basically in the last ten years, there has been an explosion of independent Chinese fashion designers, and especially so in the last five years. So, the amount of people starting their brand and getting into different things has accelerated, and that’s in part also accelerated by a development in platform culture. Hence, a lot of designers also use a platform like Taobao to engage in direct sales and direct communication with customers rather than going with stores. At the same time, there’s also a proliferation of stores selling different items like a really select shop. Hence, they curate the designers that they want to sell. The perception outside of China is still very much like, it’s not that good, it’s a lot of copying, and people don’t know that much. In part, this lack of knowledge stems from the fact that what happens in China usually stays inside; the market is here, the Chinese platforms and media is where it’s happening, etc.—though it has also been slowly getting better. I think especially in fashion, as designers have been able to leverage different platforms around the world. Let’s say Paris Fashion Week, London, etc., and they are also gaining a little more visibility and recognition.

It’s really hard to list a favorite brand. That’s really difficult, but I have more of an admiration for different people that I have seen develop. Maybe what I just showed are also things I like. For instance, Windowsen. Within the context of my research, I find it fascinating, and I think it’s a fascinating story. In some of his interviews, Sensen Lii, the founding designer, talks about the difficulties he’s faced, studying in Belgium, which I know is a tough school, challenging to enter. It was exciting to read that development and see the work that comes out—how he merges couture and sportswear and many other influences, and already found success while he was still in school. There is also another brand I like—what I am wearing, it’s JNBY, a large retailer focused on design. Also, this shirt behind me, with the pixelated people; he destroys the images and blurs them in terms of identity and gender. It’s by Xander Zhou, whom I know personally. I’ve seen him transform from gala dress designer to the most cutting-edge and sought-after menswear label. It is captivating to see the stories and developments behind these young designers.

TL: It is super interesting to see the brand from the young Chinese; actually, I can feel the culture inside them, especially when you are talking about every brand having their own story. For me, my research topic relates to branding. I think the brand has its own story, is a practical way of storytelling and represents the cultural phenomenon of China. It’s very exciting to see now in China, especially with the acceleration of economics and technology that speeds up people buying things, and how quickly and how directly people are using those shopping apps. Watching live-streaming on Taobao of that seller’s performance is also pushing people to buy things, but they don’t show the backstory of the brand. There is an exciting brand you have sent me before, and the designer tries to use the phenomenon of shanzhai culture, I think the designer is called Su Wukou, who uses the aesthetic of the copycat and reproduces some famous designs like Vans shoes?

AvD: Yes, Su Wukou has an extensive practice; it started from fashion and making clothes, but he very much gravitated toward, let’s say, street culture, a very kind of accessible fashion in that sense, but embedding it with a sort of conceptual layer. He also developed through Taobao and having different sub-brands; they have a super cool set-up. Su Wukou also has this factory project called They Are; it’s a factory that he operates, but it also became a collaboration with Vans or a part of it.

TL: Well, nowadays, especially in China, Shanghai Fashion Week 2020 is the first year that the whole fashion week moved online since the COVID pandemic, people’s shopping method also moved online, and the live-streaming sellers performing on different platforms of Chinese shopping apps like Taobao, TMall, Xiaohongshu, but it’s also accelerating the economic development of China. What do you think of those KOL sellers in the Chinese fashion industry, and how do you feel about the change from physical shopping to virtual?

AvD: Of course, there’s a big difference. I think China was one of the first to move its fashion week online in the form of live-streaming and paired up with TMall to do it. Some of these streams were set-up through an incubator platform, Labelhood, that co-hosted the streams and ran the marketing, etc. It’s a very different experience from a runway show, very different from a live event. This year, they blended the two formats, utilising live streams to sell fast, while at the same time there is still an offline fashion week. These days, young designers might more easily use apps and live streams to promote their products. What’s also interesting to see is the development of KOL sellers, such as Viya and Austin Li, who are accelerating the buyer culture and the online economy and were both part of fashion week this year, promoting emerging designers through live-stream showcases and sales events. It’s very interesting to observe this type of live-streaming performativity.

 

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Edward Sanderson Interviews Fiona Lee in Hong Kong (23 July 2021)

escdotdot presents Fiona Lee Wing-shan, 2021. Photograph by Edward Sanderson.

escdotdot presents Fiona Lee Wing-shan, 2021. Photograph by Edward Sanderson.



Introduction

For Shared Campus, I invited Hong Kong-based sound artist Fiona Lee Wing-shan to perform in a study pod on the Hong Kong Baptist University campus. Lee’s relationship to the public was complicated within this glazed, free-standing enclosure—she was cut off from the world and focused on her instruments, but nevertheless extremely visible to the passing public as well as to the wider audience via the Shared Campus live-stream. As live-streaming has been a convenient way for artists to connect with their audiences under the COVID-19 restrictions, for this interview I asked Lee how the past year had affected her work.

 

Early Covid-19

Edward Sanderson (ES): Where were you when the COVID-19 situation started?

Fiona Lee (FL): I was in Hong Kong in February 2020. My last trip away from Hong Kong had bee to join a festival hosted by Yuen Chi-wai in Singapore in December 2019. After that, COVID-19 exploded, and since then I have stayed in Hong Kong.

ES: When did the lockdowns start in Hong Kong? How did they affect you?

FL: I think the first lockdown was around the beginning of February 2020. Actually, for me, the lockdown only seriously affected me when the face mask regulation was introduced in July, before that it was fine. I don't believe in face masks, so it was very shocking for me when this law was passed.

 

Closures and Support

ES: Did all the performance venues shut immediately? How was that managed?

FL: From February to June, they cancelled all the performances and events. To begin with, the organizers just tried to delay projects for one or two months, to see what would happen (although some may have been cancelled). At that point, there were no support funds if you were involved in projects linked to the Hong Kong Government’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). But the Art Development Council (ADC) had a funding system for delayed projects. I actually had a project related to LCSD and to the West Kowloon Cultural District that was delayed, and I phoned ADC to ask if there were any kind of funds to help, but they said that it was not their project so they couldn’t help. Even with projects at Tai Kwun [arts centre], they could only help certain kinds of people with funds.

At the end of July 2020, there was a second lockdown, as there had been a lot of confirmed cases in Hong Kong. So, all the theatres and performance venues had to close down again. At that point, ADC opened up their criteria of who they could support, including the arts practitioners who were affected and whose performances were cancelled or delayed during this period. I got around 20,000 HKD for that whole period, which is not bad.

ES: How did these lockdowns affect your scheduled projects?

FL: I was not affected too much when things were cancelled or delayed, as I didn't have a lot of performances planned before COVID-19. I had one major project at West Kowloon that began in February, and the performance was scheduled for April or May. This was with Alice Ma, the choreographer, doing some workshops, trying some things out where we explore our bodies. At the beginning of the year, all the staff at West Kowloon had been planning so many projects, including bringing foreign artists to Hong Kong (like Ryuichi Sakamoto), and then all these things were cancelled. Because the local COVID-19 situation was changing all the time, the technical staff could not make many plans, or the artists either. We just tried our best to carry on with our research, but we didn't know when things would reopen.

Once LCSD reopened some venues in late May, we were able to set a date to perform in June. Our project then became West Kowloon’s main project for the theatre and they got very excited about it—they had a lot of hope for this event, and they wanted to make it really proper. I thought this was fine because the theatre people wanted to get their energy back. Our project was originally not designed to be a very complicated theatre work or a complex production; it was meant to be a very experimental piece. When we were planning, we thought it would not be for the general public, but just people we know, some dancers and some musicians. We were only going to present our piece in a small room that held fifty audience members, but with the social distancing regulations, West Kowloon could only allow half those people to attend. So, they thought this was too few people for it to be worthwhile, and they moved us to a bigger theatre which held 600 audience members. With the regulations, 300 people would be allowed to enter, although finally they restricted the registrations to around 150 people and around 115 people came on the first day.

Ours was one of the first performances after opening up. The people in Hong Kong, the art practitioners, performers, or art lovers, they were very hungry for this event. They could finally gather together, see each other, and enjoy a performance.

 

Life

ES: So, what were you doing while everything was shut down?

FL: I enjoyed my life! I was walking around my local city and observing people’s houses. I always pay attention to the people who are looking for face masks, and for toilet paper—I just observed. I stayed in my home area and walked about a lot in my district, Tai Po. I enjoy that kind of feeling. In this period, I didn't make a lot of new stuff for my own practice, because I wanted to learn or experience something other than art, other than making. So, I explored myself.

ES: Did you do any field recordings?

FL: Yes, but only occasionally. I explored food as well, the relationship between food and myself. I learned cooking and cooked a lot. My cooking is related to the philosophy of Chinese medicine. This is my recent learning.

ES: Cooking for your dog was part of this, is that right?

FL: Yes. She was born in my boyfriend's home fourteen years ago, and she got epilepsy six years ago. So I tried to be with her, take care of her, and get treatment for her from my homeopath. So, it's a very big learning period for myself. I have much more understanding about this now. My learning about homeopathy is about connecting to oneself, also with my dog, and then also to the social phenomena nowadays.

 

Taking a stand

FL:
Related to this, I actually refused a very big job as a sound artist/art practitioner for people who have neuro disabilities. It’s called i-dart project, an organization for hospitals. The activities were designed to explore different sensations, including sound and vision, to make a final theatre piece. But early in 2020, they cancelled all their art-related activities, and only maintained their normal treatments. But when they restarted the project in July 2020, they said that we have to have COVID-19 tests every time we go to the hospital. I refused to do this. I am just trying my best to protest this general demand I’m coming across a lot now, because I feel this kind of regulation is against human rights and is just part of the monopoly of the medical establishment. So, I am just trying my best. Tai Kwun is now also asking performers to all get tested as well, otherwise they do not allow them to perform on site, even if they wear masks. I think this demand is unreasonable.

For instance, I had a project that was due to take place at Tai Kwun’s F Hall in August 2020. I was the music composer for a production choreographed by Wong Pik Kei Rebecca. The performance itself could not happen but was changed into a documentary about our pre-production period. So, half the money from Tai Kwun went towards this film. Then, in April of this year, we were able to make the performance. Because it happened finally, we were able to get paid the other half of the money.

For this performance, the COVID-19 social distancing regulations meant the audience needed to be separated out. We had small sections of carpet on the floor for groups of two or four people to sit on, and also some chairs along the wall. Originally, Rebecca wanted the audience to walk around the space as she was dancing between them; however, the restrictions meant they could not move, they had to sit down on the floor.

There was quite a lot of stress for this production, as Tai Kwun requested all people involved go for COVID-19 tests. This actually gave me the strong idea that I should change my idea for the piece and give the audience the opportunity to have their voice as part of it. There's a sound loop with some texts which echo around the space with the sounds of the audience. The dance piece is about sexuality and also related to the political situation in Hong Kong, so I found some texts from various books on medical theory, the history of parenting, and sex. I found it very interesting that I could change the piece to incorporate my feelings and my perspective on COVID-19, the government, and political things.

 

Live-streams

ES:
Have you taken part in any live-streams since the beginning of last year?

FL: I joined the live-streams curated by Kung Chi-shing, organized by LCSD. All the shows were cancelled during that period, but LCSD had already scheduled a festival called ReNewVision, so they changed it into an online version. The performance series is called E(ar)-Storm, which was a series of pre-recorded performances by Vanissa Law, Alex Yiu, Jasper Fung, Nerve, and me followed by Kung interviewing each of us. The last online stream in this series was with all of us performing together live.

 

forestlimit live-stream

FL: Another online performance was an invitation from Japan, from the experimental musician Elico Suzuki. She got funding from the Japanese government for a live-stream performance between two venues, 20alpha in Hong Kong and forestlimit in Tokyo. We couldn’t jam together, but we had a certain kind of collaboration, in which the first set was by two of us in Hong Kong, and then the second set was from Japan, and the third set went back to Hong Kong—this way of performing.

 

Shared campus HKBU ava live-stram

ES: For the live-stream performance I commissioned from you that took place at Hong Kong Baptist University, how did the live-streaming aspect affect what you did?

FL: For me, it was about being there in that study pod, to feel the space and my relationship to the space. During the performance, I was also thinking about my relationship to the social situation during that period, through the materials I prepared, the broadcasts I was receiving on my radio, the pre-recorded field recordings I used, and the vinyl records I was playing. I think it was good. One thing I did was to try my best to blow up all these balloons as part of the performance, but it was a little bit difficult as it took a lot of effort. I need to practice!

ES: How did you deal with the event being three hours long?

FL: I think it is the first time I have done such a long performance. I had to manage myself; as the internal pulse of the performance was much slower, I had to slow myself down. It was like taking a three-hour slow walk. Because it’s a long-durational event, of course the changes were very subtle. But I like this. If I was doing a shorter performance, I would be much more deliberate about the changes and conscious of them. So, I love to do a performance where they are not so obvious.

 

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Nadim Abbas in Conversation with Rose Li on The Performance Is About to Begin

Nadim Abbas (NA): Perhaps we could begin with an introduction to your practice and background, for a bit of context.

Rose Li (RL): Sure. Hello everyone, I’m Rose. I’m currently a PhD candidate at HKBU AVA, and my research is about how to recontextualise jyut kek (Cantonese opera) in contemporary Hong Kong. Basically, I’m thinking, as a practitioner of jyut kek, with training and personal experience of its traditions, how could I incorporate and make a confluence between jyut kek practice and contemporary art practice—especially in the realm of performance.

NA: When we first started to talk about this workshop, it was during the height of the COVID pandemic. One of the things that we talked about was a particular frustration with virtual platforms popping up at the time, which acted as a kind of inadequate placeholder for the absence of live physical performances with audiences. In the end, your performance had elements of both. A small intimate audience who came and watched you perform on-site, and a YouTube live-stream that is now indefinitely archived as a piece of online media. How did these relationships affect the mode and direction of your performance?

RL: The Performance is About to Begin is a durational performance that takes place on a balcony at JC Contemporary in Tai Kwun. For three hours, I kept putting on make-up, without removing it. At the same time, I repeatedly chanted the statement, “The performance is about to begin. Let me finish my make-up.” There is a wish for the performance to begin, and it never will.

 

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

 

My question concerned what this preparation for performance is, and how to stage it in front of an audience—no matter if they are on-site or on YouTube. It’s also related to my current status in Hong Kong. Being in Hong Kong is a kind of perpetual waiting, or it’s always preparing for and expecting something to happen, especially after 2019, when all the political unrest came about.

I didn’t initially plan for an audience on-site—it was a suggestion that came up on the way, and I thought it could be interesting because of the balcony that is separated by an automatic door. I was close to the on-site audience, but they could never touch me. They saw me murmuring, but it was never clear what was being said, until they opened the door. It was up to the audience to enter the balcony where I was performing. For the online audience, there was also a screen separating us, but it was a different kind.

 

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

 

I thought that this partition between myself and the audience could spark a conversation on what it is that we are performing, as performers, nowadays, given the very digital adaptation of performances.

NA: Did the physical audience talk to you about this afterwards? Was there a conversation about that relationship?

RL: While I was performing, starting from the second hour onwards, somebody came out to the balcony, pushing open that auto-door. They did not talk to me during the performance, but afterwards they did, and asked me a lot of questions. For example, how did it feel like, how’s your skin, how was it like to do this kind of repetitive act for three hours? Most of the questions were about bodily experience during the performance.

NA: There’s an interesting analogy between that bodily relationship and a certain kind of disembodied relationship, which seems to play out almost perfectly with what you just described with the automatic door—this screen between you and the audience. It starts to feel a lot like the kind of separation that you have with an online screen presence. There is a constant analogy between a physical on-site setup and a virtual experience. I wonder what you would make of that, specifically in relation to your own bodily experience. Do you feel like you were accentuating your presence, of your body perhaps, or was it the opposite—were you almost disappearing into your performance, or evaporating, so to speak?

RL: At this point in the discussion, I would like to bring in the notion of liveness. That is, of both the audience at Tai Kwun, on-site, and those on YouTube watching my performance live. You are still watching somebody doing that kind of make-up repetitively, live.

 


Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

 

NA: If we bring in the question of liveness—this physical experience of the live performance,  versus the online experience of the live performance—what is interesting for me is that there  seems to be a slight difference in terms of how, if you are a physical audience, there is this spatial relationship between the performer and the audience that almost encourages a certain degree of concentration—if only for the fact that the audience knows that the performer can see them watching. Whereas if you were watching on YouTube, you may be concentrated for five minutes, and after five minutes it's very difficult to maintain the same degree of concentration when watching something on a computer screen than it is if you are watching in person. Even if the performance itself is a very repetitive, endurance-based test of the attention span.

RL: I think that also happened with the on-site audience of my performance. There was no direct interaction, and I didn’t really look at the audience—I was looking at the computer and the camera, which is like a mirror for me to put on make-up. I’d say, it was difficult for the on-site audience to concentrate as well. They could be distracted by other performances happening on-site, or books from the [Tai Kwun] library—so I think it's more of a generic question about attention span, instead of just targeting the digital audience and an online mode of distraction.

NA: Something else popped up during our earlier discussions regarding the content of your performance, that is, the use of make-up, and the act of putting on make-up. Suddenly, it occurred to me that there is an analogy again between a constant layering on top of one another, of an archival or digital accumulation of things that you might have online. Even with this archive—the documentation of your performance that we have posted online—it will be there indefinitely, and there are millions of things like this that get posted every day that just accumulate and build up. With the make-up, there is this situation where you are putting it on, and in the beginning, it is very precise, very clear—and, of course, the more that you layer over and over and over again, the more destructive it becomes, almost.

 

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

Rose Li, The Performance is About to Begin, 2021. Photograph by Nadim Abbas.

 

RL: In 2017, I did another work which I think of as a parallel to this performance. That performance installation was called Act to Forget, in which I put on and remove jyut kek make-up over and over during the exhibition’s opening hours, which was 10am to 5pm. It was like addition and subtraction at the same time—cancelling your own act. This time, it's all about accumulation. What you just mentioned is interesting, as the act of posting online is additive per se, involving a lot of desires. You desire to be seen, to be archived, to be someone online, virtually, indefinitely. In the end, you are going nowhere. It’s like when you put on make-up, at some point the act is just a gesture. This kind of meaninglessness is interesting.

NA: Would that meaninglessness translate for you to a particular kind of nihilistic worldview?

RL: I’m not yet there, and I wish I will not !

NA: You also talk about the act of waiting in relation to the current political climate in Hong Kong, and that sense of precarity that a lot of people feel. So, this notion of meaninglessness here becomes quite poignant. I'm wondering if there is a certain degree of resignation involved.

RL: I still feel an inner desire to find meaning or some kind of direction, given the meaninglessness of the current state that I’m in, and I guess that most people are in, in Hong Kong. That very subtle expectation for something to happen motivates me to live on—to do something at least.

NA: Following the same line but shifting the emphasis a bit, there is this notion of an attention economy—a social media framework that basically puts people in a state of constant captivation, where your consciousness, and unconsciousness, is saturated with media and images. Ironically, this saturation or captivation is not in a state of concentration, but a constant state of distraction. If you’re reading one Twitter message whilst watching another YouTube video, then clicking on this or that hyperlink, you’re multitasking, doing all of these things at the same time, where it’s impossible to concentrate on one thing.

In your performance, there is this challenge to the attention span. You use the device of repetition and also deferral—“The performance is about to begin. Let me finish my make-up.”—in anticipation of something that’s going to happen, that never happens. Do you feel this act of deferral is an attempt to distance the viewer, by way of breaking the state of distraction? Almost like breaking attention in order to get someone’s attention?

RL: When I was imagining this performance, I did not intend to ask for any attention from the audience. I thought of it as my own preparation backstage. While coming up with the proposal for FoMO FREE RADIO, I became interested in the idea of being distracted all the time. I thought of using the platform of YouTube live-stream to explore the relations between distraction and my performance. That was the idea—to bring in the notion of attention span to my work. For the first time doing a live-stream, it was effective, as both the audience who knew me and those who didn’t approached me afterwards to ask about the work. I felt that it could be the beginning of another body of work, which is unexpected.

NA: This seems to hinge on the contradiction of making the work for no audience, and then introducing an audience after the fact. That creates a jarring effect on how it comes across, as opposed to extremely engineered forms of performance made specifically for an audience, like certain forms of advertising, for example, where there is a very particular target or intended outcome.

RL: One idea that appeared to me both during and after the performance was—a performance could have no absolute beginning nor ending. How could I develop on this conceptually? A question for my future works.

NA: How would this relate to a particular narrative? If we think of narrative typically as a story with a beginning, middle and an end—in your case, there is no definite beginning, middle or end, so would you think of what you were doing as an “anti-narrative” of sorts?

RL: I think there are always narratives in my work, but I have to find them over the years—between performances or between works, I need to wait for the ideas, or thoughts, or feelings to emerge. Maybe this performance is related to my previous one in 2017, but it could be something else as well, ten years from now. This kind of deferral also happens with thoughts, between works.

NA: So, the deferral actually happens to the narrative as well.

RL: Yes, absolutely. But also, thinking about beginnings or endings—when I envision my body of work, I think of it like a film. It’s not like I plan all the works in advance, then execute them. It’s always in the middle of something, or in the process of finding a greater narrative, which I still don’t know yet.

NA: Here, the time of the narrative is dislodged from what you might call a kind of “real time.” It’s also partly non-linear—you are looking forward and looking back, but in no particular order.

RL: That’s why I like the films of Wong Kar-wai so much, as a body of films that you need to make connections between.

NA: Where every new film introduces new relationships to all the ones that came before.

RL: Yeah, it’s fascinating.

NA: Wong Kar-wai crafts these very beautiful images, and a lot of these images relate to a certain historical nostalgia, or recollections about Hong Kong’s past in a very specific manner. Since your practice also deals with a traditional form—Cantonese opera—how would you think of that relationship, vis-vis what you just said about Wong Kar-wai? Is there a kind of nostalgia at work, or perhaps a break with tradition?

RL: I see my practice as an experimentation of forms which jyut kek could take in the contemporary age. When you think of the films of Wong Kar-wai, for example, 2046, it’s a projection. It’s not always about a certain period in time. It could be about the future which is yet to happen. I feel like my whole practice evolves from the imagination, or experimentation of what this very rich tradition of jyut kek could be, which is not explored enough, I guess. Especially in the past decades, when Cantonese opera was no longer in the mainstream in Hong Kong.

NA: Is your attraction to jyut kek in any way related to this fading out of the mainstream? When something is mainstream, or popular, stereotypes emerge, which start to surround or obfuscate that name—perpetuating a one-dimensional understanding. Is there something about how jyut kek is no longer in the limelight that allows you to assert a more pluralistic perspective, or at least a different entry point?

RL: I didn’t think about this before, but I grew up with this fading out. When I was growing up listening to jyut kek, it’s not what my friends would listen to. It is my responsibility to reflect on this phenomenon of jyut kek moving out of the mainstream, which is related to social development, and also other cultures coming in. But I’m not making use of this intentionally, I just grew up with it. More like a personal history, in that sense.

 

* * *

 

A FoMO free playlist

The Slacker’s Guide to Love
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_laB95X4pub3gHg2GJaEhwvLwz4HgMTows

Jay Chou, 杰伦
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ8TuZP6oA0

HE4RTBROKEN, NTS SHOW ARCHIVE
https://soundcloud.com/heartbrokennights/sets/nts-show

Fiona Lee, in a loop, how far we could go beyond
https://soundcloud.com/mumamonash/fiona-lee-in-a-loop-how-far-we-could-go-beyond

Fiona Lee, tide.hongkong
https://fionaleews.bandcamp.com/track/tide-hongkong

Rose Li, Chants
https://soundcloud.com/roselizr/chants

Haruomi Hosono, Watering a Flower (花に⽔)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34UutDrXV2Q

Erik Satie, Vexations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqmQ_HJfOQs

Toru Takemitsu, In an Autumn Garden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU2Ew5_4Hb4

Charlemagne Palestine, Ssingggg Sschlllingg Sshpppingg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGpLykxAaU8


Nadim Abbas examines the mercurial properties of images and their ambiguous relationship to reality. This has culminated in the construction of complex set pieces, where objects disappear into their own semblance and bodies succumb to the seduction of space. His current research explores the relationship between historical traditions of the miniature and globalized processes of miniaturization, manifested in contemporary digital information technologies.

Tu Lang (涂朗)is a visual artist and designer, and PhD student at Hong Kong Baptist University Academy of Visual Arts. Her current research is in practice about digital art and alternative media (shanzhai media) on the internet of China. SLACKER'S LOVE is her interview livestream project on YouTube with researcher Anouchka van Driel about her China and 'Cosmotechnics' of Fashion.

Rose Li is an art practitioner who practices Jyut Kek (Cantonese Opera). Intrigued by the potential confluence between traditions of Jyut Kek and art, they aim at contextualizing Jyut Kek in and with contemporary art, in particular performance art. Apart from performance, they work with moving images (vimeo.com/roseli) and sound composition (soundcloud.com/roselizr).

Edward Sanderson (李蔼德) is an art critic and curator, and PhD Candidate at Hong Kong Baptist University Academy of Visual Arts. His research and writing focus on sonic culture in Mainland China and Hong Kong.


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Issue 53

Situated Knowledges – Curating and Art on the Move

by Ronald Kolb and Dorothee Richter

Editorial

by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Whitney Stark

Training for Together: Extended Bodies Exercise

by Lee Weinberg and Alison Green

Cacoethes*

by Basia Sliwinska and Caroline Stevenson

Whisper Game: Practising Attention Through Caring and Pacing

by Debe Sham and Georgia Kennedy

Cloth Knowledge: Sculpting with a Missing Corner

by Bo Choy and Chloe Ting

Situated Knowledge, Situated Works

Nadim Abbas, Rose Li, Edward Sanderson (with Fiona Lee Wing-shan), Lang Tu (with Anouchka van Driel)

FoMO FREE RADIO

by Noit Banai and Dani Gal

Memory Communities at the Crossroads

by Ronald Kolb and Dorothee Richter

Scores – From Situated Knowledges to Shared Action