Linda Lai : Floating Site

Installation / Floating Site (index )

Threshold Crossing: the Cartographic Imaginary 越界藍圖(中文版)


artist's impression - Box B (March 2018)	completed miniature - Box B (May 2018)

Threshold Crossing: the Cartographic Imaginary 越界藍圖 | Linda C.H. Lai (2018)

@ group show "Cabinets of Curiosities: From the Natural Sciences to the Art of Nature. Collections from France and Hong Kong" 《「藏珍閣」：由自然科學到大自然藝術》（群展）as part of French May, with artists from France and Hong Kong, at the CityU Exhibition Gallery, 18/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, CityU Hong Kong, Hong Kong

2018.05.25 10:00am to 2018.08.19 7:00pm

Tableau-miniature set with embedded video (with sound)

Twin box set | 300cm (height) x 509cm (width) x 1220cm (length) | standing on a supportive structure 120 cm tall
Material: wood, objects, digital frame with video, LED lights, acrylic board, found photos, found sounds, hydrophilic agent, varied packaging material, miniatures, video with audio, security eyes, printed digital still

Hardware Designer/Carpenter: LOK Man-chung Kel

KEYWORDS | imaginary cartography, everyday life, psychogeography, recovery of places left outiny media representation, spatial being, phenomenological existentialism, urban development, limits of the ocean, surrealism, threshold crossing

ARTIST'S STATEMENT | CONCEPT:

A miniaturist reproduction of a childhood desire for unimaginable faraway oceans and aspirations for unnameable futures form a twin-box set of curiosities.

What’s the limit of my vision and what’s possibly beyond?

Box-A (Oceans) is sealed with 3 security eyes on the front lending 3 possible views of the hidden image. The image now used is the furthest-away ocean I have ever reached up to this point of my life. It is the Atlantic Ocean bordering on West Africa and very close to Morocco, but nonetheless still in Europe, part of Spanish territories.

Box-B (Borders) re-creates a view from my childhood balcony in Shaukiwan -- the moments of looking beyond and afar. The desire to create this box grew as my diligent photo research of old Shaukiwan failed me. I found photos of every corner I know except the spot I reconstruct in this box. If the past must be handed down to us via mediated accounts, this balcony with a view, which I "owned" until i was seven, has simply escaped surviving mnemonic practices, as if it had not existed in history at all. The soya sauce workshop and rugged paths around fishing boat repair shops have submerged to give way to the Shaukiwan MTR station.

Just as maps are always made with a purpose, the two boxes construct objective geography based on personal vision.

Maps are narratives – they are explicitly selective and implicitly persuasive. To the critical mind, map narratives demand attention for absences as much as presences. In this sense, Threshold Crossing is the practice of negative cartography. The missing site and view in Box B now reclaims a piece of lost subjectivity, from where the artist’s life-long being has mysteriously evolved. “Oceans” and “Borders” are connected back to back, where oceans are contested limits and ephemeral borders, two in one.

Two wooden boxes of curiosities of equal size - 300(h) x 509(w) x 610(d) – sit back to back and open at opposite ends.