Linda Chiu-han Lai | City University of Hong Kong (original) (raw)
Papers by Linda Chiu-han Lai
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.”
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.
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, Jul 3, 2021
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.
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.”
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.
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, Jul 3, 2021
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.
![Research paper thumbnail of [edited book, 2018] Linda Chiu-han Lai, Videography. Micro Narratives. Temporal Beings. Our Manifestos.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/62974912/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Videography. Micro Narratives. Temporal Beings. Our Manifestos., 2018
This book is a compilation of the manifestos written throughout the year from 2015 to 2018 by eig... more This book is a compilation of the manifestos written throughout the year from 2015 to 2018 by eight art students working with artist/professor Linda C.H. Lai. The book project was funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to address questions on experimental art practices using video. What is videography? What is experimentation? How to overcome the shortage of resources to make art? How to make works that are strategically critical without losing our freedom of love for the poetic? These issues were addressed based on artistic experiences and processes in negotiation. The book, 140 pages with a DVD containing 6 hours of works by seven young artists, document the footprints of the team's artistic creation and thinking process. It is also a set of extended notes to annotate Linda Lai's many years of pedagogic experiments in a class titled "Micro Narratives," that is, the stepping down from assumed norms and standards of film/video production to re-conceive videography as an intermedia, cross-disciplinary, concept-driven, and speculative artistic activity without losing sight of questions of ethnical commitment in a time when moving image tools are ubiquitous. The book+DVD set is fully funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and published by the Floating Project.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2013, Edited book] World Film Locations Hong Kong; Intellect Books, UK; 112 pages [ISBN 978-1-78320-021-4]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38322079/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](World Film Location (series0
Far more than a simple collection of movie locations, WORLD FILM LOCATIONS HONG KONG delivers a r... more Far more than a simple collection of movie locations, WORLD FILM LOCATIONS HONG KONG delivers a rare glimpse into the history of ilm production practices in Hong Kong. The locations described here are often not the most iconic; rather, they are the anonymous streets and back alleys used by local film studios in the 1960s and 1970s. They are the garden cafes with outdoor seating near the Chinese University of Hong Kong where moments of conflict in romantic comedies erupt and dissipate. They are the old Kai Tak Airport, which channels rage and desire, and the tenement housing, which splits citizens into greedy landlords and the diligent working class and embodies old-day communal values. Modern Hong Kong horror films draw their power from the material character of home-grown convenient stores, shopping arcades, and lost mansions found under modern high rises. As in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To, readers will drift and dash through the streets of Central to the district's periphery, almost recklessly, automatically, or for the sheer pleasure of roaming. This book is more than a city guide to Hong Kong through the medium of film; it is a unique exploration of the relationship between location and place and genre innovations in Hong Kong cinema.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2006, edited single-artist research] [Re-]Fabrication: Choi Yan-chi's 30 Years, Paths of Interdisciplinarity in Art; Para Site Art Space, HKADC; 333 pages [ISBN 988-98963-2-X]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56454787/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This catalog is researched and edited by Linda Lai in collaboration with the artist Choi Yan-chi.... more This catalog is researched and edited by Linda Lai in collaboration with the artist Choi Yan-chi. This research-retrospective surveyed the meandering paths Choi Yan-chi has walked through: from painting to the deconstruction of the genre, from the play with material to installation, from photography and video to performance, from the quest for the burden of “Chinese-ness” to the struggle to move into conceptual art… The many trajectories mapped out in Choi’s works and pursuits speak of not only the artist’s soul-searching journey for integration and contextualization in her own art practices, but also, reflexively, the many crises and opportunities emerging in the history of the visual arts in Hong Kong. Other than pure documentation of Choi’s works and writings by and about her, the artist will re-create some of her past works to build a dialogue between the past and the present. [Re-]Fabrication, therefore, replaces conclusive retrospection and, instead, opens up more questions integral to the practice of an artist. Perhaps, ultimately and rather implicitly, the research process, the making of the catalogue, and the negotiation for [re-]fabrication comment on the status quo of art education in the territory.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2016, conference paper] "Floating Projects, Survival Re-envisioned: spatial occupation, re-production of social relations and the economy of contribution" by Linda C.H. Lai, presented at the Symposium on Hard State, Soft City: the Urban Imaginative Field in Singapore, NUS-ARI, 2016,.03.17-18.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/60436024/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Beginning as a project to protect and advance personal dreams in artistic pursuits, the Floating ... more Beginning as a project to protect and advance personal dreams in artistic pursuits, the Floating Projects Collective (FPC, 「句點」, 2010) has evolved from a group of 4 into a collective with 20 additional members in 2015, and its activities renamed Floating Projects (FP「據點。句點」, literally “occupation point”). FP takes on a spatial turn by occupying an 1800-square-foot industrial unit in a fading industrial district, Wong Chuk Hang (WCH黃竹坑), on the southern part of Hong Kong Island, where the increase of disused and vacant flats forces their owners to open up to atypical manufacturing usage. The spatial turn has fueled our imagination and soon evolves into a series of experiments around a central question: what can we artists do with an empty unit in an industrial building with institutionally and physically defined constraints? How does what we do connect to the premise that art is by definition a form of radical thinking, thus an indispensable force in nourishing our humanness? At the point when FP inserted itself into WCH, the district was already the home for several commercial galleries in addition to two new boutique hotels on top of various independent art spaces and artist’s studios. The rent FP is now paying could have been 30% less a year earlier. The question of art is the question of space in a milieu when art and design are heavily appropriated to be the supporting pillars of what is known as “creative economy,” an aggressive agent for gentrification, the flip side of which reads the problematic transformation of urban surfaces.
FP is not only an experiment, but it seeks to be experimental, in the sense that it strives to re-open up many known normal artistic practices to assert questions of art must be understood also as those of non-artistic nature. Issues of how to keep making art, and of how to scramble for resources to sustain survival, become a new series of questions. Can artists working with different artistic media work together, and how about artists of different generations and expertise training? Who is the artist – only those who received formal studio art education in an art school? Are there modes to publish and share art other than the white cube model? How does a collective accommodate individual aspirations and desires? What possible modes of survival and sustainability are there beyond the commercial versus charity support binary structure?
Rooted in Critical Theory concerns, FP’s production of space (Lefebvre) is considered the impetus for the reproduction of social relations. FP asks: how do we sustain the progressive posture of art, preserve art’s non-conforming and implicitly anti-establishment character in the age of gentrification, when art increasingly becomes a decoration, or a kind of added value? These questions all point to the need to re-imagine and re-invent a different sort of creative economy, called “the space of creativity.” (Hui Yuk, DOXA) At this point, FP is answering to the demand of a relevant model – one that (re-)generates singularity (of the individuals) and promotes new collectivity, or the enactment of co-individuation. (Simondon, Stiegler) What does it mean to be an artist in a hyper-capitalist digital age in which our feelings and temporal being are the main targets of moderation and control through broad-scale commodification of art and design (Lukács, Stiegler) in the name of urban progress through gentrification (Hui)? As many government-initiated local projects highlight heritage re-enlivening and/or are implicitly imbued with a social work concern or rhetoric, what does FP as a collective conceive to be the new relations between the politics of art, de-proletarianization (the regaining of one’s place in knowing and in producing new knowledge), and the practice of love and care?
In the short period of seven months, a few signature event series have emerged to be place-holders of individual desires and the practice of care for others. The conference presentation (and the full essay) will elaborate on how our purposes are realized in the following programs – WCH Assemblage (on re-purposing dumped material into art installation and object performance), Work-in-progress Inspection, Spatial Pressure Calibration (improvised sound-making), Floating Teatime (an on-line writing platform), and other free contribution from FPC members specific to their talents -- all occurring on an open-to-all indoor space furnished with a charity café with a free wi-fi reading environment to encourage person-to-person conversations, and a growing library and digital archive to promote the culture of documentation as many of us are media artists.
FP is not just an organization, but itself an art project that interrogates questions of space and being. Re-orientation of art is central to the re-orientation of everyday life, which must begin with spatial re-orientation.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2013, conference paper] "Auto-ethnography and Everydayness: a performative research on women artists in contemporary Hong Kong," at international symposium "Vision Crossing Boundaries and Beyond Differences: Women's Art in Greater China since the Contemporary Turn" (Bowdoin) 14-15 Sep 2013.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/62898506/thumbnails/1.jpg)
]("Female Embodiment of the Visual World: Women’s Art in Contemporary China, Hong Kong and Taiwan," an international symposium at Bowdoin College, USA, 2013
This is a conference presented at the Panel “Women’s art in Contemporary Hong Kong and Taiwan” in... more This is a conference presented at the Panel “Women’s art in Contemporary Hong Kong and Taiwan” in the symposium ‘Female Embodiment of the Visual World: Women’s Art in Contemporary China, Hong Kong and Taiwan’, an international symposium in conjunction with art exhibition at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, September 27-28, 2013. This paper was then retitled "‘Women’s Art in HK’ Reframed: a performative research in progress on the potentialities of women art-makers," substantially revised, and published in POSITIONS, v28, n1, Feb 2020, pp. 237-274. A discussion on women's art in Hong Kong often has to pass two kinds of apologetics: why "Hong Kong" and why "women." Most of the female artists I have interviewed recognize the evolvement of "women's art" as a local discourse, but few of them rely on this discourse to structure their artistic creation. Taking a performative approach, this research essay affirms "women's art" as a problematic yet productive point of departure. It has invoked a series of conversations that open up concrete realities of artistic practices, revealing similarities and differences within an apparently simple construct of cultural labor.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2013, conference paper] "DOOR GAMES WINDOW FRAMES: NEAR DRAMA / Generative Cinema"; an artwork presented with long text at the 16TH GENERATIVE ART CONFERENCE (GA2013), Milan, at the Triennale Gallery](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38321585/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The artwork is an algorithmic 3-channel projection, also an experiment on combinatorial narrative... more The artwork is an algorithmic 3-channel projection, also an experiment on combinatorial narrative generated from a data library of 500+ digitized movie clips from 1960s Hong Kong melodrama.
Everyday Coloniality (III): How Wars End - Practices of (Re)Making States after 1945, 2012
Hong Kong’s colonial period only ended in 1997. While a 15-year period may be too short for a his... more Hong Kong’s colonial period only ended in 1997. While a 15-year period may be too short for a historian’s critical distance, my ‘mining’ activities as a visual ethnographer led me to a dozen of video diaries submitted to a special program called “Digital Biography of 1997” organized by the Hong Kong Arts Centre to mark the changing sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain’s to China’s. These diaries, by active members of Hong Kong’s cultural arena who are not filmmakers, took me to the micro-level of everyday life in each of the submitter’s living space and daily activities. These works are precious: as I watched them one by one, I realize abstract domains such as sentiments, emotions, anxiety, uncertainty, moods and other states of mind became very concrete for studying.
These video submitters do not represent the average Hong Kong person. They are all, in Gramscian terms, ‘intellectuals’ each trained and working with a very specific language to articulate their subjectivities. There is a poet, a novelist, a cultural theorist, an artist in political comics, painter and so on. Their ownership of a ‘language’ of theirs, and the position they each already occupy in the network of local cultural production, form the very basis for this research.
This group of works is relevant to the study of Hong Kong on the verge of de-colonization, and to the general concern of the project of “Everyday Coloniality” in the following ways:
(1) It shows how states of mind and states of emotions can be perceived and studied with the textual construct of self-made media artifacts. Through the range of choices of subject matters, the naming of individual videos, and the automatic recording power of the video camera of intended or unintended details, I come into the presence of the complexities of the everyday.
(2) The video diaries in questions are pictures of minds as well as documentation of a mind writing itself. They also give us glimpses of human agency at work – how an individual (as a non-expert of film/video) constructs and invents a visual language adequate and satisfactory for personal articulations.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2011, conference paper] "How to be Human, Good, and Civilized: Everyday Modernity in the Crevices (a Study of Movie Ads for the 15 Lost Local Films Produced in Hong Kong 1934)"; at 'Transnational Workshop: Everyday Coloniality: Migration, Ego-documents, Visuality'; Seoul](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38321902/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Following the imperatives of Revisionist Film History debated since 1979, this research examines ... more Following the imperatives of Revisionist Film History debated since 1979, this research examines the bulk of movie ads for the 16 films made and shown in Hong Kong in the entire year of 1934 in order to solicit portraits of the everyday that concern ideal citizenship – as a British colonial subject, a patriotic Chinese and new personhood for modern society – as well as negotiations in embracing these conflicting subject/object positions. Mainly movie ads are studied because they are the only surviving fragments of the films made or exhibited that year. An immediate survey finds these ads phenomenally verbose and burdened with moral admonition. By writing a theory of fragments, and arguing for a spatial approach to historiography that results in a ‘slicing’ method, I study movie ads of the same films found in major Chinese-language newspapers as these films travelled from one movie house to the next across the year.
The original full study of all the movies and movie ads in question is about 100 pages long, which I have adapted for my presentation in the WCU Project 2011 in three parts: (I) the basic conceptual set-up on my historiographic methodology; (II) illustrative data and examples of interpretive strategies I applied to the raw material; and (III) extracts of historical knowledge produced in this study, i.e. arguable portraits of colonial modernity translated into paradigms of everyday ethics.
The historiographic problematic underscoring this study has three facets. First, is film history possible when no viewable films are available? Second, as the bulk of raw material available for this piece of history is primarily ideas and sayings (in the form of movie ads)? How can ideas pass for ‘making’, the key to the notion of ‘lifeworld’ (lebenswelt) and ‘being-in-the-world’, as Husserl and Heidegger use these terms? What kind of everydayness is speech and persuasion via language? Third, what interpretive model best serves the writing of a piece of history concentrated on the fragmentary, often contradicting, trade of thoughts and verbal persuasion? The use of theory is to direct me where to look, how to access, and what narrative strategies to adopt to communicate my findings.
The year 1934 can be characterized as lacking in events of monumental value. A brief moment of peace soon to be rocked by the growing impact of Japan’s aggression in China, 1934 can be described as a ‘crevice’ that has gained little attention in the attempted history of Hong Kong. In fact, it is a unique space-time allowing access to the richness of many everyday operations. The study of ads suggests a de-centering model of film culture: cinema is productively generating knowledge both as concentrated cultural texts and as activities that are only the results and effects of other domains of everyday life. In the context of this study, I have detected explicit persuasion in daily ethics and paradigms of conduct. The discourse effect I read phenomenally falls upon gender divisions: women’s behavior became the central object to define the up and down side of modernity. The government’s most power instrumental reason at the time, especially the promotion of sports, health and sanitation, found its way into the commercial strategies of the film business. In the mean time, what I call ‘Cantonization’ – the differentiation and re-invention of the Cantonese-ness of Hong Kong people, as opposed to their Chinese ethnicity or being a British colonial subject – transformed local filmmaking that resulted in a new boom in the coming few years.
***This paper was presented at a historians' workshop, 2011 WCU Alltagsgeschichte: “Transnational Workshop: Everyday Coloniality: Migration, Ego-documents, Visuality”; Organized by the WCU Alltagsgeschichte Transnational Team at Hanyang University’s Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture (RICH), funded by the World Class University (WCU) Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea / October 2011
![Research paper thumbnail of [2010, conference paper] "Meditations on a Minor History: VOICES SEEN, IMAGES HEARD"; presented at the "Everyday Coloniality" workshop for historians, Seoul.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38323006/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The paper was an introduction to the screening of my experimental video work VOICES SEEN, IMAGES ... more The paper was an introduction to the screening of my experimental video work VOICES SEEN, IMAGES HEARD, which raises questions of the use of sight and sound in history-writing. My presentation and screening of my work was followed by a response paper/citation by Prof. Alf Luedtke, Chair of the historians' workshop
![Research paper thumbnail of [2006, conference paper] "Constructivist Animation for a Disappearing City: Hong Kong’s McDull Series"; at the ANNUAL CONFERENCE FOR SCMS (Society for Cinema & Media Studies) 2006, March 3, 2006, Vancouver, Canada](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38321717/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This essay, “Constructivist Animation for a Disappearing City: Hong Kong’s Mcdull Series," is als... more This essay, “Constructivist Animation for a Disappearing City: Hong Kong’s Mcdull Series," is also called "Constructivist Animation as Archive: a visual ethnographer’s site for cultural memory & dreams,”
This essay sets out to make sense of the popularity of a well liked animated feature series made in and on Hong Kong, the Mcdull series, at a point when the anxiety for the former colony’s handover to China gradually turned into that for an unsatisfactory local government. The first half of this essay documents my struggle to make sense of a unique mode of graphic realism in the work in concern, and its role in the overall bricolage style. In the second half, I take up the role of the visual ethnographer’s to explore the series’ potential in forming a visual archive of Hong Kong’s local culture and mnemonic system of the past. The political valence of an archive (in the Foucauldian sense) as well as the performative function of populism will be examined in my critique.
This essay will deal with two individual feature-length animation pictures, MY LIFE AS MCDULL (2001) and MCDULL, PRINCE DE LA BUN (2003).
![Research paper thumbnail of [2004, conference paper] “Journeys of the Self: Auto-ethnography as Narrative Enquiry"; Crossroads 2004 International Cultural Studies Conference, Urbana Champaign](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38322891/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This paper discuss a digital video project I have done, which results from a visual ethnography p... more This paper discuss a digital video project I have done, which results from a visual ethnography project about my own life in the past thirteen years. The project began as one to document others, and gradually grew more and consciously in the direction of autoethnography as I became increasingly interested in questions of visual anthropology, ethnomethodology in Cultural Studies, historiography, and women’s writings and autobiography. Alongside, the works of Chantel Akerman, Su Friedrich and John Mekas have opened up questions of performativity, automatism and editing as a concentrated phase of making senses of oneself via organization. While these are also core issues in my project, my concern with the epistemological character historiography, the material emphasis of ethnographic research, and the notion of automatism as a creative impulse/principle/method from my tangential relation to these seminal works. A traveling self of an Asian woman in world cities would be deconstructed as to how useful ethnic identities are in these self journeys.
***The presentation was accompanied by the screening of an excerpt from the author's video work I TOLD THEM MY CAMERA WAS ON (final revised version 2005)
![Research paper thumbnail of [1998, conference paper] "Transposition of the Self in Everyday Presentation along the Formation of a New Consummerist Popular Culture in the People's Republic of China"; NCA (NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION) 1998 CONVENTION; New York City](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38321677/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Chinese selfhood is often subjected to philosophical containment: confucianization or marxianizat... more Chinese selfhood is often subjected to philosophical containment: confucianization or marxianization. This essay reconfigures the question as the presentation of the person in everyday dramaturgy by analyzing a variety of screen texts since late `80s. The contemporary “self,” I argue, embodies a set of complex relations reconciling economic demands, political disciplinary power, and textualization, all directed towards effective government. This paper originates from a research done in a Ph.D. seminar conducted by Prof. Toby Miller. The origina research was rewritten for the session 'The Dawning of a New Century: Lessons Learned, New Visions' in the panel "Constructing the Self and Other in Critical and Cultural Studies" panel, 20-24 November 1998, New York City
(various online platforms), 2009
This is a set of notes prepared by the author to accompany a presentation of her experimental doc... more This is a set of notes prepared by the author to accompany a presentation of her experimental documentary video work in the form of a video poem, "Non-Place, Other Space" (2009), for "Urban style; build up a (un)fair world,"’ Afro-Asian Institute Graz, Austria, June 7,2011, after its appearance in International Competition at the 57the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 5-11, 2011. The text was also presented in the inaugural edition of the Open City London Documentary Festival at the University College of London, June 16-19, 2011 -- as part of a special selection by Jihlava Documentary Film Festival with a post-screening discussion. The video poem was a result of the author-artist's reflection on the place of the banal objects, material fragments in the quotidian, as well as the random and occasional presence of the camera in "remembering" a place beyond monumental and economist significance.
The text has been preserved on the author's personal blog and her online work archive: http://www.lindalai-floatingsite.com/content/video/data/published/Non-place-other-space/index.html
Floating Projects: Floating Teatime: Art Notes, 2023
(bi-lingual) [Mending Years 縫補歲月 group show, 2023.06.28-07.12 Gallery L0, JCCAC] "Domestic Moonli... more (bi-lingual) [Mending Years 縫補歲月 group show, 2023.06.28-07.12 Gallery L0, JCCAC] "Domestic Moonlighting" (DM) is one of the five on-site installation artworks in Mending Years (2023.06.28-07.12) at the Gallery L0, Jockey club Creative Art Centre, Hong Kong. DM is an adaptation of Lai's "1906-1989-2012: Guangzhou-Hongkong-Shanghai-Anji" (2012), commissioned for the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012-13), now part of the Power Station's permanent collection in Shanghai. In her stipulation, domestic moonlighting by women and children in Hong Kong in the 1960s-80s amounted to postal volume of 57.5 million kg at the postage value of RMB94.7 million, sent from Hong Kong to China, during the period with events leading to the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Domestic Moonlighting is a reference to Fernand Braudel's work by delving into Hong Kong's undocumented micro (domestic) economics.
The essay here combines the original notes in the exhibition proceedings and from a dossier of background research Lai published for "Domestic Moonlighting."
https://www.floatingprojectscollective.net/art-notes/no-private-histories-domestic-moonlighting (uploaded 12 July, revised 17 July 2023
Photowork Annual 28 , 2022
This is an essay commissioned by peer invitation (PHOTOWORKS editors) as an annotation to the iss... more This is an essay commissioned by peer invitation (PHOTOWORKS editors) as an annotation to the issue's anthological assemblage of photography arts by Hong Kong artists, a team research funded by the Rencontre d'Arles Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2020 (awarded to Monica Allende et al 2020). Lai's essay highlights the gap between expectations and reality and the inability of images to accurately reflect the experience of those living through a movement. It essay also raises new directions for Hong Kong artists, refreshing the understanding and use of a singular work as generative nodes for negotiation.
ISBN 978-1-903796-57-3
Asia Art Archive Project Archive, 2023
First named after our location, "Wong Chuk Hang Assemblage" was a series of events in which membe... more First named after our location, "Wong Chuk Hang Assemblage" was a series of events in which members of the collective gathered disused and discarded material and reactivated such found objects' physicality to give them a next life. From the Assemblage's object play and installation evolved an element called "Spatial Pressure Calibration" with a soundmaking incentive. Floating Projects Assemblage (FPA), now with its Wong Chuk Hang (2015.07-2018.07) and Shek Kip Mei (2018.08-) phases, persists in a semi-improvisational principle for hybrid performances. It is Floating Projects' signature event to embrace a broad range of reasoning, from logistics management to experimental art exploration. Over the years, the events have provoked us to ask many questions. What is art? What is a collective? Is FP Assemblage a form of playing? A metaphor? An exercise? And what kind of knowledge have we produced? This essay is not a doctrine of Floating Projects' installation-performance signature event the Floating Projects Assemblage, but a process of finding terms, concepts, and vocabularies to describe and narrate what happened, and the conceptualisation that came afterward. Contextually speaking, it is a moment in Hong Kong history whereby the FPA could contribute a way of thinking about creativity, being together, and forms of autonomy.
This essay is accessible online: https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/performance-floating-projects-assemblage-at-aaa
A Playbook is also available on this web page, which is meant for providing shareable frameworks for open trial and experimentation.
KEYWORDS 關鍵詞: Articulation 接合-Automatism 不假思索法-Body 身體-Challenge 挑 戰 > Adjust 調整-Chaos 混沌-Co-individuation 個別化互聯-Creator as Player 遊玩者為創作 者-De-aesthetisation 反美術化-Deterritorialisation 解域化-Drift 遊走-Entanglement 糾 結-Enunciation 發聲-Event 事件-Experimental actions 實驗性行動-Failure 失敗-Hub 樞 紐-Improvisation 即興-Installation 裝置-Happening 發生-Heterotopia 異域-Layers of thoughts 思考層次-Lines and varied measurable speeds 速度有別的行動線-Loops vs Routines 循環 vs 常規-Ludology (game and play) 遊戲學-Narrative 敘述-Network 網絡-Objects 物 件-Orchestration 编排-Performance 表演-Performativity 演述性-Planned and unplanned 計劃出來的／沒有計劃過的-Player-performer 遊玩演出者-Plugging in 插入-Precarity 不穩 定性-Random 隨機-Re-artification 復藝術化-Reasoning 理據-Recognisability 辨識度-Recycling 循環再用-Repurposing 改變用途-Rhizomes 根莖體-Rhythm 節拍-Risk 冒險-Space 空間-Site 場地-Situation 處境-Sound 聲音-Tension 張力
PhotoworkAnnual 28, 2022
This is an essay commissioned by peer invitation (PHOTOWORKS editors) as an annotation to the iss... more This is an essay commissioned by peer invitation (PHOTOWORKS editors) as an annotation to the issue's anthological assemblage of photography arts by Hong Kong artists, a team research funded by the Rencontre d'Arles Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2020 (awarded to Monica Allende et al 2020). This essay highlights the gap between expectations and reality and the inability of images to accurately reflect the experience of those living through a movement. It essay also raises new directions for Hong Kong artists, refreshing the understanding and use of a singular work as generative nodes for negotiation.
ISBN 978-1-903796-57-3
Spring Program, March 14-May 24, Oct 11, 2012
This is the full program (art catalogue) of Spring Program an artists and professionals' residenc... more This is the full program (art catalogue) of Spring Program an artists and professionals' residency series for the Critical Intermedia Laboratory curated by Dr. Linda C.H. Lai at the School of Creative Media, the City University of Hong Kong. The Spring Program is the final presentation of a year-long research "Formation of a Value-rich Peer Community for continuous, criterion-referenced and authentic Assessment"; funded by a Teaching Development Grant received with Dr. Olli Leino.
Spring Program's main objective is to encourage students to look beyond Hong Kong through the visits of quality artists and media professionals. It demonstrated the range of practices within what we call media art, to illustrate how more traditional art forms have found transformed presence and practices in the digital milieu.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2019, essay] Ruminations: Critical Miniatures & a Montage of HK's (Post)Coloniality; in The Sun Teaches Us that History is Not Everything. Osage, Hong Kong. Pp. 80-87](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/60046947/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The Sun Teaches Us that History is Not Everything, 2019
The essay outlines the author's conceptual journey in how to make sense of her (post)colonial exp... more The essay outlines the author's conceptual journey in how to make sense of her (post)colonial experience, from the case of re-writing 1492 (Columbus' expeditions) to History of Everyday Life movements' call for writing miniatures (Alf Luedtke) to modes of urban experience (Walter Benjamin) and production of space (Henri Lefebvre) in the Critical Theory paradigm. The second half of the essay details how the author turns her conceptual journey into artistic production through a series of miniature with multiple strategies as her critical articulation, highlighting experience as object-subjectivities.
![Research paper thumbnail of "Object-Subjectivities: a Techno-art Saga" (2018) in Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time," proceedings for an art exhibition for art-science dialogues, March 2019, pp.160-169. [ISBN978-962-442-442-5]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/62922274/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time, 2018.12.27 - 2019.01.10, 2019
"Object-Subjectivities: a Techno-art Saga" is a curatorial statement in the form of an artwork. I... more "Object-Subjectivities: a Techno-art Saga" is a curatorial statement in the form of an artwork. It is an 8m long interactive digital chronology mapping all the14 artworks in the show Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time (27 Dec 2018 - 10 Jan 2019, City Hall Exhibition Hall, Hong Kong, curated by Linda Lai) onto a broader history of art and technology, based on assumptions in media archaeology. The making of this chronology adaptively combines Erkki Huhtoma’s topos study approach, and Siegfried Zielinski’s “deep time” perspective, built into Lai’s ongoing experiments with notation systems and chronological visualization. In Huhtoma’s terms, topos study emphasizes “cyclically repeated motifs and processes, but does not deny progress,” and each artwork in the show is the focal point of a topos, such a work can imaginably form a unique landscape with the individual artist’s ongoing practices. The varied assembled landscapes of the 14 artworks in this show together accumulate into a geography for topoi analysis, attending to recurring discursive concepts, visual or audio, that can be traced cross-historically and, to various extents, cross-culturally. Lai finds such a broad view emphasis compatible with what Zielinski would call “deep time,” which is a distributive model, looking at objects and events (i.e. “media attractions” as he calls it) that are plottable on a chronology system equally as much as the vast silences and blankness of what is in between points. The chronology presented here marks an initial step in examining the “dynamics between continuity and change” and attempts a deeper more interconnected understanding of past traces of media art situated in Hong Kong. Visitors can access the data nodes on the point-line graphical map using a wireless joystick set, and explore the links in whatever way their curiosity leads them.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2016, art catalogue, double solo] "Mnemonic Archiving: a Dispersive Monument" in The Third Script (art catalogue)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/47428180/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The Third Script (Pearl Lam Galleries-Singapore), curated by David H.Y. Chan, comprises my site-s... more The Third Script (Pearl Lam Galleries-Singapore), curated by David H.Y. Chan, comprises my site-specific installation, "Mnemonic Archiving: a Dispersive Monument," and the works of Singapore filmmaker Boo Junfeng. The catalogue is a full documentation of the concept of the works and individual components
![Research paper thumbnail of [2015, edited art catalogue] Tracing Data: What You Read is Not what We Write, Proceedings (WMC_e5, October 2014); 118 pages [ISBN 978-988-14525-9-7]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/38322340/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](“Tracing” is multiple. Following, step by step, moment by moment. Recording. Scanning. Compiling.... more “Tracing” is multiple. Following, step by step, moment by moment. Recording. Scanning. Compiling. Archiving. Unfolding. Reconstructing. Decomposing. Deconstructing. Streamlining. Visualizing. Sonifying. Mediating. Transforming. Translating. Transferring. Associating. Mapping. Combination. Permutation. Integration. Hypothesizing. Calculating. Estimating. Interfering. … These are the manifold actions that the artists of WMC_e5 have enacted on the data they are working with. The impact of computation on both aesthetic expression and aesthetic criticism has been widely felt. Not only artists but also critics are using digital technologies to analyze works of art and literature. Computation generates new modes of art by which criticism and artistic creation meet, an apt description for many works in this exhibition.
This catalogue, edited by Linda Lai, is a post-exhibition documentation of the 5th exhibition of the Writing Machine Collective at Connecting Space-HK in October 2014.
Contributors include Hector Rodriguez, Daniel Howe, Winnie Soon, Audrey Samson, James Coupe and Harald Kraemer.
This project is fully funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2011, edited catalog] Computational Thinking in Existing Art Forms; Writing Machine Collective Edition 4](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/60046858/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Computational Thinking in Existing Art Forms, 2011
This is the full print catalog (46 pages) that describes the conceptual principles and curatorial... more This is the full print catalog (46 pages) that describes the conceptual principles and curatorial directions with full description of all participating art works at the 4th edition of the Writing Machine Collective's exhibition-workshop series, at Youth Square, Hong Kong, in Jan-Feb 2011. The event was fully supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council's Project Grant in Media Art. The catalog is edited by curator Linda Lai with contribution from all artists.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2004, edited art catalog] A Matter of Ownership: an Exchange between Para/Site and the Substation; Para Site Art Space, HKADC; 138 pages [ISBN 988-98963-1-1]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56454870/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This catalog comprises of Book A (105 pages) and Book B (33 pages). Book A is subtitled "On Time:... more This catalog comprises of Book A (105 pages) and Book B (33 pages). Book A is subtitled "On Time: art-making & history-writing," which documents Para/Site artists' seminar forum and exhibition event at The Substation, Singapore, with post-visit extended creation in the form of paper/book art. Book B records The Substation's artist and curator's visit in Hong Kong, titled "On Space."
The editor of this catalog is one of the participating artists and speakers.
A Matter of Ownership began as the proceedings for an exhibition and symposium series curated by Leung Chi-wo (Para/Site, Hong Kong) in Singapore (The Substation). In the making process of the book, it grew into an extension of the events and a series of post-exhibition art on paper, beyond the parameters of the exhibition.
Ownership, the Basic Story… Whose Story?
The five narratives interrogating our “ownership” of the city space of Hong Kong presented at Substation (Singapore) all take a polemic stance. They bear tangential relations to the prime story of how the HK government takes care of its people.
This prime story traces the shifts from the HK government’s provisions of loans and land resources to enable willing organizations to help construct concrete homes for needy people, to the government’s direct administration since the 1960s, and to the current strategy of involving the private sectors to build and manage these homes. The move from subsidized housing to private home ownership is persistent.
This prime story also demonstrates a series of change of vision, from the provisions of a roof top to the homeless, to the systematic tightening up of communities within and around the urban core, maturing with emergence of the idea of a “comprehensive housing plan” in the 1970s, to the concentrated efforts to project what an ideal home should be for the ordinary people.
Embedded in the notion of the ideal home are factors “scientifically” identified against the contexts of Hong Kong’s environmental and physical geographical features, as well as accounts of Hong Kong people’s average lifestyle. Tim Li’s “Shadow Casts in Time & Space,” his recreation of the “ideal home,” placed right after the chronology, is, therefore, at once visionary, projectile and dialectic.
Art Notes, Floating Projects, 2016
Adapting and expanding on a curatorial statement for EXiM 2015, published on-line for a 1-hour pr... more Adapting and expanding on a curatorial statement for EXiM 2015, published on-line for a 1-hour program on experimental videography by young artists in Hong Kong (Experimental Film & Video Festival in Macau), it reflects on two other recent events, a conversation I hosted with Jamsen Law and Howard Cheng on video art at the Hong Kong Film Culture Association, and my solo screening at the EXiM 2015.
Original curatorial statement could be found here:
http://eximacau.blogspot.com/2015/10/1114-november-14-saturday-400pm.html
![Research paper thumbnail of [2017, March] Levitated Potentiality: moving images at Art Central 2017 移形换步: 流動的影像](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56480433/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](A moving image program Linda C.H. Lai curated for Art Central 2017 brought together film projecti... more A moving image program Linda C.H. Lai curated for Art Central 2017 brought together film projection and digital imaging works to show experiments and innovations transcend what we call old and new media…
![Research paper thumbnail of [2017, July] Orientations: Boundaries Surveyed: on initiatives in contemporary video art in the Asia Pacific](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56481489/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](EXiS2017: [EX]perimental film & video festival [i]n [S]eoul, 2017
This is a curatorial feature for a survey show on video art in the Asian Pacific by Linda Lai pub... more This is a curatorial feature for a survey show on video art in the Asian Pacific by Linda Lai published in the proceedings for the 14th Experimental Film & Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS2017), 13-20 July 2017. "Orientations" was an hour-long program with eight works from Hong Kong, Singapore and Melbourne. It seeks to profile the diversity in approaches to videography based on works by artists that the curator found in a 12-month framework.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2012] Description, Attention, the Phenomenology of Perception and Cognition](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56481428/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This curatorial statement, written for the show "Descriptions of Hearing" (11 Feb - 25 Mar 2012) ... more This curatorial statement, written for the show "Descriptions of Hearing" (11 Feb - 25 Mar 2012) at Digital Arts Center, Taipei, describes the process of gathering art pieces that correspond to Deleuze's notion of description, in the context of the phenomenology of sound as an artistic, perceptual experience.
Higher Education, 2011
This paper describes an exploratory study on the perceived value of higher education by Chinese s... more This paper describes an exploratory study on the perceived value of higher education by Chinese students in Macao SAR, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Taipei. Using responses from 316 students, we find that the Sheth-Newman-Gross Theory of Consumption Values explains how students perceive the services offered by higher education institutions. Students have different opinions on the value items, which we group into two functional values (the usefulness of a degree and the experiential aspect), social value, emotional value, epistemic value, and conditional value using factor analysis. A stepwise multiple regression analysis shows that students' satisfaction depends, to a large extent, on two functional values-the experiential aspect and the usefulness of a degree. Moreover, when comparing value judgments based on gender as well as other demographic and social variables, the results show no significant differences between the mean scores in perceived values. Implications for delivering effective educational services in higher education conclude the paper.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2005, unpublished] Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels: a Playful Review of the Rhetoric of Comedy](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56465072/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This essay picks up the idea of Sullivan’s Travels occupying a special position in Sturges’ corpu... more This essay picks up the idea of Sullivan’s Travels occupying a special position in Sturges’ corpus as well as in the US film history, but with rationality different from Cavell and Henderson’s. My initial interest for writing about the film was incited by its equivocal, at times contradicting, intentions blended into a single text. The film makes an argument about the necessity of comedy in society in a tongue-in-cheek manner, within the generic framework of comedy. Added to this, the film calls my attention to its ultimate celebration of comedy in the final scene, also as a final seal of irony for such fact.
This essay has two interconnected objectives. My first objective is to describe a fundamentally unsettling quality I find in Sullivan’s Travels, seeking to make sense of the film as an eclectic text of comedy, combining traces of different species within the genre, from slapstick, screwball, romantic comedy, satire to high comedy. The film is not only a turning point in Sturges’ career, but also a rare instance embodying the effort of someone working within the confines of institutional norms to seek for unconventional moves to attempt reflexive statements on the status quo of genre and industry. My second objective is to dialog with Bazin and Truffaut’s evaluative position on the film’s achievement and failure, grounded in certain assumptions for desirable cinema.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2005, 2016, unpublished] Psychoanalytic Narratives for Eclectic Borrowing: trans-textual operations in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56464841/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This essay deals with two connected questions: "is the horror genre really the most productive fr... more This essay deals with two connected questions: "is the horror genre really the most productive framework to understand "The Shining?" and "how does the use of
psychoanalysis figure in this work?"
My discussion deals with psychoanalysis as a meta narrative, as it is adapted for artistic expression and making sense of the irrational side of human behavior. The analysis here is NOT the proper structuralist, text-bound psychoanalytic reading of a film text. Coming from Cultural Studies: I'm interested in how psychoanalysis has become a form of popular knowledge and how it is being used, appropriated, imagined and polemicized. In my research of Kubrick, it is evident that he has psychoanalytic ideas in mind in working out the entire project of The Shining.
My focus on Kubrick's use and articulation of psychoanalytic knowledge also reopens the question of intentionality in film studies. As I understand it, the culturalist turn often subjects authorship to broader cultural reading and interprets the work of individual agency to be functions of institutional
constraints. Perhaps because I'm also an artist myself, I am drawn to analytical approaches that allow personal desires and private intentions to be brought back for scrutiny.
![Research paper thumbnail of [2004, artist book] Cryptoglyph: dialogues in many tongues in the hidden crevices of an open city](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56454778/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Two artists, Linda Lai and Theresa Mikuriya, played an 8-round game in different parts of the cit... more Two artists, Linda Lai and Theresa Mikuriya, played an 8-round game in different parts of the city of Hong Kong to explore the many levels and modes image and text could enter a dialogue. The result was a 282-page art book with four possible tables of content, also four road maps into the labyrinth of their mind, spilling out the city of Hong Kong to over 14 world locations.
The book is a playful statement on how performativity works through artist dialogues.
Return Flight 3.0, 2019
This piece is a collage/pastiche of poetry, (surrealist) automatic writing and expository fragmen... more This piece is a collage/pastiche of poetry, (surrealist) automatic writing and expository fragments from Linda Lai's personal writing archive. The experimental form is meant to investigate the nature of writing as here-and-now articulation of self and the surroundings that turn an invisible mindscape into communicacable forms. Writing is thus about chance encounters, nonsense soundings and movement of consciousness, highlighting the thought process, allowing expression, critique, description and imagination to converge as a rich sensory experience. This piece is commissioned by Return Flight: MEL <>HKG curator Elizaveta Meltzeva in collaboration with the Melbourne-based literary magazine GOING DOWN SWINGING.
The fact of art-making as a social/cultural institution implies that the single artist is never r... more The fact of art-making as a social/cultural institution implies that the single artist is never really alone in action: in assessing the outcomes of art education, many stake-holders are involved - fellow artists in the art community, theorists, historians, critics, technologists, curators, producers, art administrators and so on. SCM has long been aware of the importance of involving expertise in teaching-and-learning at different levels. Service and study tours, exhibitions, internship/practicum as graduation criteria, forums with professionals from the creative industries have played a crucial role in enabling students to meet with the public, to flesh out purposes and core values, and subsequently to magnify the intended outcomes of the curriculum proper. All these activities have been proven to be effective in broadening horizon for creativity as well as career. Our rigor and vigor has been objectively documented at: http://sweb.cityu.edu.hk/teachingandlearning In order to act in harmony with the University's focus on assessment, we want to renew a strategic community of stakeholders to become part of our teaching-and-learning practice, and furnish evidence to close the loop of authentic Outcome Assessment (OA). Most of the activities are recurring but methodology of assessment will be strengthened by making use of the peer community. The project will be considered as a school OBTL (Outcomes Based Teaching & Learning) initiative, and under the inspection of the SCM OBTL team. The project is complementary to Outcomes Assessment (OA): structuring "negotiated intended learning outcomes" and forming a value-rich peer community, a proposed OBTL research project for compiling a document stating the principles and practices unique to School's mission for quality art education and with multiple templates for assessment tasks of different nature. This project is now pending for funding support for OBTL Implementation 2010-11.