I recently saw three of the videos in Tang Kwok Hin’s ongoing series ‘Present “Reminiscences of the Eastern Capital”‘ at Para/Site Art Space. Mounted side-by-side on the gallery wall, they were immediately captivating, speaking to many things I wonder about – presences and absences, changing spaces and practices in cities, the incursion of big brands and big capital into more and more spheres of life. The camera’s unchanging focus upon street fronts, and the layering of spaces and images put ‘new’ (read: global capitalism) and ‘old’ (read: local merchants and industries) aspects of Hong Kong up for consideration. Ghostly people walk straight into gated store fronts, and buses pass in front of local shops, only to leave Dior and Louis Vuitton in their wake. While the absence of sound in the gallery heightened my experience, you can find a version of one of these shorts with sound here:
Tag Archives: memory
Transferring, moving, forgetting
“there corresponds to the constitution of a scientific space, as the precondition of any analysis, the necessity of being able to transfer the objects of study into it. Only what can be transported can be treated. What cannot be uprooted remains by definition outside the field of research.” (p20)
“A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements.” (p117)
“These fixations constitute procedures of forgetting.” (p97)
Fragments from Michel de Certeau’s The practice of everyday life, 1984.
Dr. Allison Hui 