For some reason red plastic bags have been very common in Hong Kong. You could maybe even describe the red plastic bag as an unacknowledged local cultural icon. It has especially been used by market stalls and in the smaller non-brand-name stores that ordinary grass roots working people buy from. This video brings together a series of clips featuring the red plastic bag in Hong Kong. These clips were all shot in 2014, in the months prior to the Umbrella Movement street occupation and democracy protests which started in September that year. Most are observations of the red plastic bag in its natural habitat, the Hong Kong streetscape, the diversity of which is introduced along the way. You might even say that the Hong Kong streetscape is the real subject of the video. The documentary mode that is apparently being employed is undermined by introducing a few staged clips, thereby blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, with consequences for viewer reception of the video as a whole. Not long after this video was made a 2015 extension of the plastic bag levy introduced charging that affected the kind of stores that previously gave away this kind of bag, and it has already become less common to see red plastic bags around in Hong Kong. For this video I use my signature hand-held jerky video style, which is in some ways a parallel to the interest I have in blur in my still photography. As in some other videos I have made I am interested here in how one’s mode of attention might shift during the course of viewing. Sometimes the red plastic bag’s appearance in any given clip is not easy to spot, and requires a sort of ‘Where’s Wally?’ type of scrutiny from the viewer. Anticipation is built into the structure of the video – we know from the title that a red plastic bag is going to appear at some point. The use of jump cuts and the interest in additive structure are long-standing for me.

David Clarke is both an art historian and a visual artist. Trained in London, he moved to Hong Kong in 1986 to take up employment at the University of Hong Kong, where he worked till 2017. Clarke’s art historical research has been primarily in the areas of American and Chinese art history, and his sole-author books include: The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture (1988); Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization (2001); Water and Art (2010); and Chinese Art and its Encounter with the World(2011). As a visual artist Clarke has exhibited his work in Hong Kong and around the world on more than sixty occasions during the last thirty years, including several one-person museum shows in Hong Kong and an extensive one-person exhibition in Britain. He has published two photo books concerning Hong Kong: Reclaimed Land: Hong Kong in Transition (2002) and Hong Kong x 24 x 365: A Year in the Life of a City (2007). Recent projects have focused on artistic collaboration: he undertook a dialogue with performance artist Kwok Mangho, with the composers Chan Hing-yan and Joyce Wai-Chung Tang (who have both separately written musical compositions in response to Clarke’s photographic images), and with creative writer Xu Xi (a word/image dialogue was published in 2016 as Interruptions by the University Museum and Art Gallery, HKU). Clarke is the founder and academic director of the Hong Kong Art Archive (http://finearts.hku.hk/hkaa/), and has played major public service roles for organizations such as the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, and the College Art Association. A series of 73 lectures by Clarke on modern art is freely available online athttp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsYxtdAdqBSfNEVf2Y9WsN1YyOe-5G52i.