Video Art in Hong Kong: Organologic Sketches for a Dispersive History

**The research of this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CityU 11404614) for a comparative and broad historical survey of video art in Hong Kong

Linda Chiu-han Lai (2015): "Video Art in Hong Kong: Organologic Sketches for a Dispersive History,” Hong Kong Visual Art Yearbook 2014, Fine Arts Department, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Article accessed on-line [English......]

黎肖嫻：〈錄像藝術在香港：一個飄散的歷史存實的內部勾描〉，《香港視覺藝術年鑒2014》，香港中文大學藝術系，2015年初版。香港藝術發展局資助。

KEYWORDS: video art, independent cinema, deconstructive mode video art, phenomenological mode in video art, constructivist mode, indexical-performative mode, experimental cinema, experimentation, what is art, organological view to art practices, media archaeology

Introduction

An essay dedicated to all experimental artists and future researchers of Hong Kong video art: 
To make sense of the history of video art of a place, such as Hong Kong, one must begin to allow apparently unrelated human purposes, courses of events, nstitutional histories, incidents and accidents, personal calling, as well as desires that precede and surround the popularization of a named practice, to shed light on this single medium and its players. This latter position embraces the wisdom of media archaeology,1 enriched by Bruno Latour’s call for the study of shared agencies between humans and artifacts integrated into the same framework, and finds wholesome integration in Bernard Stiegler’s view of organology. While contextual factors may have determined a lot of what happened, in most media history studies, we are not always ready to come face to face with the fact that the inner logic of a medium, especially how the tool itself affords practice, could have driven certain directions of development more than we have understood simply because we leave it out of our investigation. I shall open myself to consider as many of these issues as possible: tracking down institutional provisions, processes, artists and their facilitators, the disparate but abundant locations where video art activities were realized and made visible, and what has been left out, so as to generate a tentative portrait of video art in Hong Kong, in contrast with other regions.

要理解地方的錄像藝術，例如香港，就要考察似乎沒有關係、卻凑成錄像藝術的歷史現實的各方面，包括人為目的、事情經過、制度政策、論述的作用、有意識策劃的事件、意外和巧合、個人感召、創作意欲和口味等等，如何幫助或限制錄像普及化，惠及使用錄像的人。這種考察觀點採媒體考古學的方位， 並得到法國社會學家拉圖爾（Bruno Latour）有關人和人造物之間相互作用的研究作補充， 同時又融合了法國哲學家斯蒂格勒（Bernard Stiegler）普遍器官學的看法。 環境因素固然決定很多事情的出現，但在媒體歷史研究上，卻往往對媒體的內在理路藴涵積極的潛在性的認知有所缺乏，尤其忽略了創作乃由媒體本身的物理性所促成。有見及此，本文旨在討論以下議題︰追尋錄像在藝術體系制度裡的痕跡、創作者使用錄像的實踐過程、有那些創作者而促成他們創作的又是誰、有那些創作錄像的場所、那些談及或記述錄像創作的論述的據點、又或錄像未能全面而暢順地談及的地方等等，並略描香港錄像藝術對比其他地區的情況。（黎肖嫻）

Article accessed on-line [English......]

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