A game of montage art, Doors Medley is a re-mix of two existing work of mine – Door Game (2005, 26m) and Door Games Window Frames (2012, 11m30s), which explores visual mannerisms and formulaic structures of film melodrama of the 1960s in Hong Kong. Doors Medley highlights specifically gender paradigms embedded in popular culture. From anthropology’s viewpoint, we have created drama and we also reenacted the drama we create. Popular cultural texts fine-tune specific course of events with narrative logic, which we fervently imitate to act out our daily roles. Isolated narrative fragments, as they are subject to free combination, reveal their hidden predispositions.

《重重門。門對門。》是我另一個的個蒙太奇創作遊戲。我把兩個已發表的錄像作品－2005年的《戲門》(26’)和2012年的《景框戲門》(11’30”) －重新整合，從上世紀六十年代港產文藝片的板斧，進一步鑽進性別模式在視覺風格和敘事結構上可尋的蛛絲馬跡。我們創造戲劇，提煉出有特定走勢的劇情…。到頭來，又契而不捨的模仿著，作為上演每天生活的 綱領。似是而非的劇力把我們吸進情愛道義的門內，塑造了我們日常生活的倫理。透過蒙太奇的遊戲，我希望重新打開看似單純的每一個鏡頭；臉上一顰一笑、門窗一開一關、人情道義… 向我們展示的會是甚麼？

(Chinese version courtesy of artist’s website)

Linda Chiu-han LAI, Associate Professor in Intermedia Arts at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media (SCM), is a research-based interdisciplinary artist. After completing her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University, she has sought meaningful connective extension to other relevant artistic and theoretical endeavors. She persists in artistic creation as the practice of theory. A critical researcher on the History of Everyday Life, her works focus on historiography, visual and auto-ethnography, urbanity and popular culture. Her teaching revolves around the criticality of micro/meta narrativity. She has also designed, at SCM, Hong Kong’s first courses in generative art & literature at the university level. She founded HK-based new media art group the Writing Machine Collective (2004) and has completed 5 major group exhibitions on questions of computational thinking and contemporary art. Though broadly known for her videography in the international art venues, she creates in different artistic mediums to turn art-making into criticism, history-writing, gaming and voyages of discovery. 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, the Open City London Documentary Festival, LOOP Barcelona, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, the Fourth State of Water (CoCA, Torun, Poland), Women Make Waves Film Festival (Taipei), International Centre (New Delhi), and the various Experimental Film/Video Festivals in Seoul (EXiS), Taipei (EXiT), Macao (EXiM), Kuala Lumpur (KLEX) and Hong Kong (HKEX). Lai considers herself a montage artist: to her, images are intensely rich perceptual surfaces that defy the binary division of representation and abstraction. Many of her works also deploy the notion of an archive and self-archiving, including her recent work “1906-1989-2012: Guangzhou-Hongkong-Shanghai-Anji,” commissioned for the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012 at the Power Station of Contemporary Art, which is also a piece of experimental history playing with childhood memory, the use of everyday objects and folk material, the postal history of Hong Kong and family stories. Lai seeks for intermedia moments and modes of connectivity, be it conjugation, modulation, combinatorial logic, or permutation… Floating Projects is her recent experiment on modes of sustainability in art-making and artists’ associations.