Curated by ZENG Hong
Yale-China Arts Fellow 2020
Stella Ying-chi TANG: People in the Streets of Hong Kong (2012)
TANG Kowk-hin: Don’t Blame the Blossom (2018-)
Linda Chiu-han LAI: Voices Seen, Images Heard (2009)
Jamsen Sum-po LAW: Walking the Walk (2015)
Kalen Wing Ki LEE: Hong Kong Year Book, 1997, Separation, Glitch (2019)
Bryan Wai-ching CHUNG: Movement in Time, Part 2 (2019)
From the Curator
“The poor image is a copy in motion,” wrote Hito Steyerl*, to defend the low quality images that result from the digitalization in today’s visual culture. Image production, which used to be state-owned, is becoming increasingly privatized. Steyerl argues that this privatization gestures towards a democracy of image production, circulation, and appropriation. Moreover, the poor image is liberated from the hierarchy of image quality and instead the visual idea becomes the primary focus.
The spirit of the poor image is in line with the characteristics of Hong Kong contemporary art. Booming from the 1980s, leading Hong Kong artists have attempted to visualize the vernacular culture and identity of the region, rather than focusing on “aesthetics” or craftsmanship. The prevalence of digital media further helps them to explore the intensity, hybridity, and fluidity of Hong Kong everyday life via low resolution pictures, cell phone videos, non-conformist visual matter, or alternative archives.
The exhibition Hong Kong in Poor Images presents painting, photograph, film, video, glitch and algorithmic artwork that make use of poor digital image and digitalized archives to capture the people, cityscape, history and ordinary life of Hong Kong. Stella TANG uses a digital camera to snapshot people in the streets and transformed them into the figures on canvas. Also documenting the city space by a portable camera, TANG Kwok-hin’s photographs shows the in-betweenness of professional “punctum” provider and amateurish practitioner. Linda LAI digs into archived footage to uncover the history of her city. Jamsen LAW’s cell phone records people’s presentation of their bodies in the streets for self expression. Kalen LEE’s glitch art manipulates the digital data of an image that symbolizes the official history. By employing the technique “optical flow” in computer vision, Bryan CHUNG’s algorithmic art piece tracks the flow of pixels across consecutive picture frames in time, to represent the propensity of martial art shown in Hong Kong movies.
—ZENG Hong, PhD
Yale-China Arts Fellow 2020
* Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux journal 10, no. 11 (2009).
There will be a celebration of Yale-China Association’s Lunarfest at the Ely Center
Saturday, February 8, 12 – 4 pm
Opening Reception: Sunday, January 12, 1 - 3 pm
Closing Reception: Sunday February 16, 1 - 3 pm
BRIAN SLATTERY : NEW HAVEN INDEPENDENT
Artists Reveal Hong Kong Behind The Headlines | January 28, 2020
