April 2023
VMAC Article
The Fragmented Commonplace: Alternative Arts and Cosmopolitanism in Hong Kong [Excerpt], Hector Rodriguez
This essay proposes the category ‘culture of the fragmented commonplace’ to describe a cluster of recent works of Hong Kong theater, literature, film, and video. This culture is not so much an organized artistic movement as a loose tendency comprising a cluster of narrative subject matter, methods of formal construction, and thematic concerns. It developed in a historically circumscribed period that began around 1975 but mainly encompasses the 1980s and 1990s. This culture does not embrace the whole of Hong Kong artistic production; its core examples were often produced in avant-garde cultural contexts outside mainstream commercial institutions influenced by international modernism.
The culture of the fragmented commonplace rests on two salient characteristics. First, it contains specific references to well-known Hong Kong streets and landmarks, historical events and situations, vanished architecture, old popular songs, local slang or myths or folktales, disposable everyday objects, and other concrete elements that produce a strong sense of place. The works I have in mind invariably establish a link to the historical memory and everyday reality of Hong Kong by drawing on and reasserting a recognizably local culture.
Second, these various referential contents are depicted as an assemblage of fragments. The artists in question produce a collage effect, an impression of intense heterogeneity, by drawing on diverse or unrelated subject matter and employing abrupt shifts in mood, location, and point of view. Video artworks like Image of a City (May Fung and Danny Yung, 1990), She Said Why Me (May Fung, 1989), Project No.9064 (Kwan Pun Leung, 1990), 95/23 Ninety Five/Two or Three (Ernest Fung, 1995), Love (Hung Keung, 1997), Happy Valley (Waiting at T Zero) (Mark Chan, 1997), Diary from the Hard-Boiled Wonderland (Ip Yuk-yiu, 1998), Invisible City ‘Wall’ (Rita Hui, 1998), and The Song of the Earth: ‘The Farewell’ (O Sing Pui, 1998) generate an effect of fragmentation by juxtaposing archival footage or balck-and-white photographs with fictional or documentary images in the present, and sometimes with written material superimposed on the screen. Novelists like Leung Ping-kwan (Cutting Paper, 1977) and Xi Xi (My City, 1976) employ a ‘multi-perspectival’ method: The authors shift between the standpoints of two or more characters, producing an inclusive and many-sided image of the city out of an accumulation of multiple particular experiences.[1] The idea of collage has also been explicitly theorized. Video and installation artist Jamsen Law, for instance, has described video making as a collage activity that generates new meanings through the juxtaposition of diverse material.[2]
These artists seldom employ classical methods of narrative organization; they tend to avoid goal-oriented protagonists who face obstacles or conflicts and achieve a clear-cut resolution. The typical strategy is to abolish or attenuate causal chains and to rely on ambiguous or ‘open’ endings. The culture of the fragmented commonplace sometimes shows an intense attachment to those ‘dead’ or ‘trivial’ instants normally excluded from classical narrative as irrelevant to the main dramatic conflict. Instead of offering the resolution of a ‘well-constructed’ plot, such novels and films conclude by seeming arbitrarily to cut off a potentially limitless accumulation of random everyday moments. Novels and films with a stronger narrative framework, such as Evans Chan’s To Liv(e), construct several intersecting, crisscrossing stories that shift between documentary and fiction in order to bring forth a strong effect of stylistic heterogeneity. These various methods produce the impression of a random and open-ended collage of highly diverse materials. The everyday domain splinters into broken fragments of history and daily life, or into multiple impressions or experiences. This collage effect allows artist to fulfill two basic aims: to retain some form of social reference and at the same time to adhere to the stylistic self-consciousness characteristic of international modernism.
Artists are sometimes drawn toward the compression or brevity of the poem or the sensuous immediacy of the photograph, aiming for the maximum possible concentration of meaning and expression. The short story or video art piece are ideal forms to achieve this abbreviation and intensification, but longer novels, films, and stage performances often seem to be a loose assemblage of relatively brief passages that could to some degree stand on their own as short stories or vivid vignettes. The artwork becomes a scrapbook of small moments, memories, and gestures. These variegated elements retain their autonomy as fragments, refusing wholly to subsume their distinct particularity into any general artistic structure.
In a few cases, this assertively fragmentary quality is the consequence of a collaborative production process. The forty-three-minute avant-garde video The Song of the Earth: ‘The Farewell’ (1998), for instance, was created by six video makers (Rita Hui, Jacky Siu, Veronica Law, Eugene Mak, and Jack Cheung, along with O Sing Pui, who coordinated the project and retains final directorial credit), some of whom worked independently on different segments that can stand on their own as separate projects. The video is clearly divided into discrete blocks or units with distinct formal characteristics that range from a montage style reminiscent of silent city symphonies to a long-take approach. Another example is a collaborative creative process that leads toward an impression of stylistic heterogeneity is the 1998 multimedia stage performance adapted from Dung Kai-cheung’s novel The Atlas. In addition to the music of Chan Ming-chi composed for percussion and traditional Chinese instruments, the performance also featured dance and video art prepared by various artists associated with the local avant-garde groups Videotage and Flowery Flowery World.
Such a collaborative approach, however, remains relatively uncommon. In most cases, the collage effect arises out of the personal aims and interests of an individual artist responsible for the whole work. This essay employs the term ‘background’ in a technical sense to denote the frameworks of assumptions and concerns that supply a motivation for the choices that artists make. In my account, a background comprises the reason or reasons why one or more artists at a given time act as they do in creating their works. My discussion of the culture of the fragmented commonplace considers five backgrounds that contributed to the rise of this culture: (1) the influence of cultural studies, especially the ‘post-structuralist’ reworking of semiotic theory; (2) a ‘revisionist’ understanding of history that privileges small-scale everyday objects, places, and activities rather than ‘epic’ or heroic events; (3) a modernist interest in intertextuality, defamiliarization, impermanence, and the nonrational; (4) an interest in the city as a distinct phenomenon, based on the assumption that urban space is not only an objective datum but also an ‘expressive’ or ‘phenomenological’ space comprising memory, desire, and imagination; and (5) a renewed interest in the lyrical trends of classical Chinese art and some of its more contemporary heirs.
This essay does not contend that every work of the culture of the fragmented commonplace partakes of all five backgrounds. Some artists were influenced by only one or two of these factors, and few of the works discussed here are ‘pure’ instances of the culture of the fragmented commonplace. Sometimes only particular scenes or segments of a work partake of the characteristics I am considering. The scope of my project is to identify broad areas of intersection between individual works or artists, not to provide the final word on any of them. My examples remain very different from one another, and it would be misleading to impose a unity that does not exist. The culture of the fragmented commonplace forms nothing more than a node in a broader network of intersecting, overlapping, but also heterogeneous works and genres.
[1] Poet, novelist, and cultural critic Leung Ping-Kwan has discussed multiperspectival literature in ‘Urban Culture,’ in The Metropolis, 41. (The Metropolis: Visual Research into Contemporary Hong Kong, 1990-1996. Hong Kong: Photo Pictorial Publishers and Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1996.)
[2] Law, ‘Nietszche, Deleuze, and Video Art,’ 2. (Law, Jamsen. ‘Nietszche, Deleuze, and Video Art.’ Master’s thesis, The University of Hong Kong, 2000.)
Reprinted with the author’s permission. Original article in Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural Asia, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
(The views and opinions expressed in this article published are those of the author/s. They do not necessarily represent the views of VMAC.)
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VMAC Online Database – New Features Highlighted
The redesigned VMAC online database went live in March this year! In addition to the Advanced Search, which allows you to narrow down your search, another key feature of the revamped database is the inclusion of links between different data fields, such as artists, works, and Videotage programme histories and literature (including programme publicity, ephemera and documentation). It enables users to dig deeper into the data mapping to discover connections and gain insights. With the expanded functionality, we believe that the database will be an important portal in providing a more comprehensive view of local media art history.
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Taking video as an example, it has undergone changes in different formats, from analogue to digital, from VHS to mov files. Video has had its own players in different eras. How can we, as a media preservation institution, ensure that people of different generations can see the same images? The challenge of time-based media preservation is not only the problem of physical storage space, but also the problem of digitisation, documentation and mechanical loss.
In January this year, the VMAC Forum invited n.b.k from Germany and LIMA from the Netherlands to present their preservation methods and practices. They discussed how video organisations with different structures deal with media works in their own countries and, at the same time, the limitations they face as non-profit organisations.
About VMAC Newsletter
VMAC, Videotage’s collection of video and media arts, is a witness to the development of video and media culture in Hong Kong over the past 35 years. Featuring artists from varied backgrounds, VMAC covers diverse genres including shorts, video essays, experimental films and animations. VMAC Newsletter, published on a bi-monthly basis, provides an up-to-date conversation on media arts and their preservation while highlighting the collection and its contextual materials.