Floating Site
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VERSION: 23 March 2024 [print pdf]
Linda Chiu-han LAI 黎肖嫻, historian, writer and research-based trans-disciplinary artist, works at the intersection of intermedia arts, experimental moving images, Critical Theory, the histories of everyday life and media archaeology, as meaningful extension of her PhD training in Cinema Studies (NYU). She persists in artistic creation as the practice of theory. Lai is interested in human-thing/machine co-agency, and a materialist in her moving image practice. She prefers an anthropological stance in her investigation of art and cinema, drawing also from speculative theories in exploring the epistemological force of imaging. Most of her works, videography or installation, are historiographic experiments, thus also the interrogation of narrativity. As a montage artist, she considers images material facts with rich perceptual surfaces, defying the figuration-abstraction binary split. Her videos have appeared in documentary and experimental venues, including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Traverse Video (Toulouse), LOOP Barcelona, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), and the Asian experimental film/video circuit in Seoul (EXiS), Taipei (EXiT), Macao (EXiM), and Kuala Lumpur (KLEX), among others. C3A (Cordoba, Spain)[1] had her video art retrospective in 2021, after dedicated solo features in EXiM (2015)[2] and EXiS (2017: Inde-visuals).[3] A critical researcher in the History of Everyday Life, she seeks organological views of cinema and art’s fluid relation to other existential and social-economic domains. She was part of the 3-year historians’ workshop series Everyday Coloniality at Hanyang University (Seoul, Korea, 2010-2012) headed by the late Professor Alf Luedtke. At the School of Creative Media (1998-2023), she designed inter-disciplinary courses on the criticality of micro/meta narrativity, new materialism’s contribution to media archaeology as historiography, automatism in pre-digital and digital artmaking, visual ethnography, sound art, and generative art & literature. Micro Narratives, a signature course of hers, integrates interdisciplinary theories in a laboratory context of videographic experiments, which has proliferated into two editions of “video manifestos,” involving about 60 young artists in writing about their own works. A parallel yet distinct project to the manifestos is an ongoing online video zine, D-Normal/V-Essay, a participatory project that gathers short video pieces from artists and non-artists, especially the latter, through open call and curation. Some of Lai’s historiographic experiments take the form of research-creation and (self-)archiving activities, such as Door Games Window Frames: Near Drama, automated 3-channel projection on HK Cantonese melodrama (2011, Hong Kong Contemporary Art Award), 1906-1989-2012: Guangzhou-Hongkong-Shanghai-Anji (Shanghai Biennale 2012-13) and two iterations of Mnemonic Archiving: a Dispersive Monument in Singapore (2016) and HK (2017) at Pearl Lam Galleries, which explore the spatial-visual logic of connectivity among memory objects. Archiving and experimental historiography are also central to Lost Texture at H-Queen’s “Exit Strategies” (2019), Ruminations: a Montage of Hong Kong's (Post)Coloniality (2018, Osage), Blasting Modernities 1930s: Techniques of the Self (2017, Para Site), Domestic Moonlighting (2023) and Tree of Life plus at signals… chapters 1-3 (Para Site 2023). She also experiments with chronologies as a unique narrative form to process her media archaeological research, such as Object-Subjectivities (2016, “No Reference,” Videotage) and her curatorial statement in the form of an interactive map, Object-Subjectivities, a Techno-Art Saga (interactive chronology, 2018-19, “Algorithmic Art,” City Hall, Hong Kong), both site-specific experimental chronologies exploring media archaeological readings of Hong Kong’s media (art) histories. By 2021, she has completed two editions of her video Manifesto project, seeking a deeper view of HK’s media art practices. Floating Projects (FP, 2015- ) is her participatory art experiment on sustainability as “collectives.” Her concern for art-tech dialogues prompted her founding of the Writing Machine Collective (2004- , with 6 group shows and one lecture-seminar series), which epitomized in her curatorial experiment “Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time” (2018-19), a public exhibition and educational event to mark the 20th year of the School of Creative Media (SCM). Lai’s commitment to bringing art, humanities and science/technology together began with her founding the new media art group ?the Writing Machine Collective (WMC) in 2004, with persistent curatorial experiments to define critical interdisciplinarity by illumining computational thinking in digital and pre-digital art practices. More recently, her concern has informed her research and teaching in media archaeology, a conceptual space to argue for the many possible dialogues between the arts, sciences and the humanities. Numerous courses she has created for the SCM articulated her research in possible dialogues of art and technology, such as “Media and Contemporary Art: an Archaeological Study” (graduate level), “Generative Art & Literature” and “Narrative Strategies” (undergraduate) to move beyond cinematic narrative. To the general public, she spoke on “What is media art?” at the Cultural Centre and Visual Art Centre, delivered an hour-long lecture “Living in the Age of Convergence: (working through) the scientific images, manifest images and the aesthetic images”[4] (2022, WMC_e7) and dialogued with on-line audience through her presentation “Art and Tech: an inventory of an 18-year-old experiment”[5] (2022, 7th Network Society). With the Floating Projects (FP, 2015- ), she explores with young graduates concrete possibilities of survival and sustainability, such as exploring the contextual meaning of the economy of contribution and gift culture, as opposed to pure dependence on charity models in art practice. FP experiments also focus on deploying new technology to form new communities. D-Normal/V-Essay, a FP initiative in the form of an online video zine, is Winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the ART(ist) 2022” initiative. Her works have been acquired by M+ (HK, 2019), Video Bureau (Guangzhou/Beijing, 2015), and the Power Station of Art (Shanghai Biennale). She was “Artist of the Year 2017 – Media Art” (Hong Kong Arts Development Council). In 2022, online video zine D-Normal/V-Essay was a winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the Art(ists) Initiative (Linz). [6] (updated 23 March 2024).
Notes [1] https://www.c3a.es/exposiciones-actuales/detalle/-/asset_publisher/pQ0PxnELFHyj/content/linda-chiu-han-lai-retrospectiva [2] http://oxwarehouse.blogspot.com/2015/10/exim-2015-hong-kong-experimental-video.html [3] https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/movie/PM_006954 [4] http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/wmc_e7/annotations/ [5] https://www.caa-ins.org/archives/9923/2 [6] https://ars.electronica.art/stateoftheartist/en/d-normal/
Chinese biogsraphy (long version)
Chinese biography (shorter version)
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VERSION: July 2023
A Ph.D. in Cinema Studies (NYU) and Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong's School of Creative Media (SCM), Linda LAI has been a writer, trans-disciplinary artist and independent curator for contemporary media arts. She was the Expertise Group Leader for the School's Critical Intermedia Studies (2002-2010), and currently the Leader of the Bachelor of Arts in Creative Media. Lai has regarded teaching as both a location for exchange with young people and that for research in pushing the limits of disciplinary boundaries. Evolving from her prime training in cultural and media/cinema studies, she has actively sought connective extension to other relevant art and cultural domains. With such an orientation, she has not only taught cultural studies subjects, contemporary art, film histories and theories, but also authored various innovative courses at SCM. For example, she started Hong Kong universities' first sonic art course in the context of contemporary art and cultural studies, as well as the course Generative Art & Literature, in which experimental literature and code-writing are examined together to illumine the nature of computational thinking. She has experimented with a new pedagogic model with her colleagues -- the "concept-driven workshop/laboratory" in which the teaching of theory and history is intensely integrated with art-making, and where a process-oriented approach re-defines artmaking as a passage of discovery through rule-driven experiments and hypothetical thinking across media. In this light, she has designed and taught a series of workshops on narrative explorations and experimentations with moving images. She also created SCM's first-year core "Writing & Creativity" in which students experience writing as the meeting point of creativity, intermedia thinking, self articulation and research. Her critical and creative works in general have a strong concern for language and micro/meta-narrativity, grounded in a feminist sensibility that integrates critical theory, cultural studies and historiography. Her academic writings primarily interrogate the problems of history-writing. Most of her creative works have a visual, auto-ethnographic dimension.Her digital and non-digital works have been shown in key venues in many cities in Europe, Asia and the US, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Germany; Open City Documentary Festival, London, UK; LOOP Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; Rencontres Internationales, Paris, France and Berlin, Germany; Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Jihlava, Czech Republic; Women Make Waves Film Festival, Taipei, Taiwan; India International Centre, New Delhi, India; Centre of ontemporary Art, Toru?, Poland; HKIFF, and the various Experimental Film/Video Festivals in Seoul (EXiS), Taipei (EXiT), Kuala Lumpur (KLEX) and Macao (EXiM), where she was featured in a solo screening in 2015, Lai considers herself a montage artist: to her, images are intensely rich perceptual surfaces that defy the binary division of representation and abstraction. Her videographic experiments have been featured in solo screenings at EXiM 2015 and EXiS 2017. [go to -> video works and other art works] Recent large-scale art works include mixed media installation commissioned by/for the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012.10.01 - 2013.03.31) at the Power Station, in which childhood memory, the use of everyday objects and folk material, the postal history of Hong Kong and family history form an alternative account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from a HK point of view. She also completed a site-specific exhibition at Pearl Lam Gallery-Singapore, "Mnemonic Archiving: a Dispersive Monument" in 2016 in a double solo, which will be adapted to "Menomic Archiving 2.0" when the show is re-staged in HK's Pearl Lam Gallery at SoHo. Recent significant works include her essay “Video Art in Hong Kong: Organologic Sketches for a Dispersive History” (2015, HK Visual Art Yearbook 2014), “Documenting Sentiments in Video Diaries around 1997: Archaeology of Forgotten Screen Practices” (2015, Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, Wiley-Blackwell), a historiographic experiment drawing from concepts of ego-documents and phenomenological thinkingand, also a supplement to HK cinema history, as well as the research-based installation “Object-Subjectivities” (2016, 'No Reference', Videotage) on HK’s media art history. Her latest initiative is the Floating Projects, an experiment on artistic sustainability and modes of art association, featured in the 'Hard State, Soft City' symposium (2016, ARI, NUS, Singapore). One of her favorite published artbooks is Crypto-glyph: Dialogues in Many Tongues in the Hidden Crevices of an Open City (2004) with Theresa Junko Mikuriya, a 288-page documentation of their 8 rounds of dialogues via photography and text. The book also carries her theoretical meditations on the dynamic relations between visuality and writing as a performance, and adaptive experiment for automatism. Another of her favorite is [Re-]fabrication: Choi Yan-chi’s 30 Years, the paths for interdisciplinarity in art (1975-2005) (2007), researched and edited for Para/Site Art Space's "Hongkong Artists in the 1980s" series. Her academic writings so far have a focus on urbanity, cultural memory and identity politics in cinema, as well as theoretical issues in cultural historiography and how to open up its horizons. World Film Location Hong Kong (Intellect Books), which she co-edited with Kimburley Choi, was out in July 2013. Research writing in preparation, evolving out of her research grants, are mainly in two directions: media archaeology as a research-historiographic paradigm for Hong Kong, and the use of feminisms among local artists in connection with the use of "women's artist" as a framework. Lai had been a juror for various editions of IFVA (Independent Film & Video Awards, Hong Kong) and the Bloomberg Emerging Artists Program, and examiner for the Hong Kong Arts Development Council's Media Art sector. She is the founder and currently Artistic Director of the Writing Machine Collective (2004- ), and founder and experimenter of the Floating Projects (2015- ). She considers herself an "advocate curator," that is, her curatorial works are meant as critical projects to raise questions about the history of media art and to call attention to critical-artistic practices that may have fall out of popular focus. "Critical Spectacles," "Micro Narratives" series and "Orientations: Boundaries Surveyed" are such examples. In her capacity as an educator and artist, Linda has worked with many young and aspiring art practitioners in Hong Kong. On 11 May 2018, she was awarded "Artist of the Year (Media Arts) 2017" by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
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