We’re really fortunate to have artists nnscya (Annisa Cheung) and Wong Winsome Dumalagan visiting London from Hong Kong this May. nnscya’s and Winsome’s practices are representative of the practical and imaginary responses to their lives in Hong Kong and the wider region. In terms of the media they work with—in Winsome’s case film and installation, and in nnscya’s, sound and music—I’ve always been struck by how meaningful and engaging the directions they take have been, their aesthetics reflecting a reality that allows for dream-like observations and a magical reinterpretation of mundaneness; in terms of the creative scenes of Hong Kong, they have feet in both the official and the underground, which is perhaps a characteristic trait of relatively small communities.
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EVENT: Mouthpiece & Trail Shoes: nnscya & Wong Winsome Dumalagan
While I’m in the UK, I’m taking the opportunity to plan some events for visiting artists – those I have worked with in Hong Kong either directly or who hold a relation to the spaces for experimental performance there that I have been documenting. In early May Hong Kong artists Annisa Cheung (aka nnscya) and Wong Winsome Dumalagan will be in town for a few days, and we have arranged the event ‘Mouthpiece & Trail Shoes’ on the 7th of May at the artist-run venue Eat the Sunshine . Down the Sun in South London. The evening will include a solo performance by Annisa, a screening by Winsome, a collaborative performance by them both, and finally I will join them for a conversation about their work. Hopefully we will meet there!
For more details and tickets: https://gel.now/events/286
Ou Ning: digital technology and political society
Dan Edwards: I noticed in a lot of the footage in the film [Ou Ning’s Meishi St (2006)], Zhang [Jinli] is filming the police, but the police have cameras too.
Ou Ning: Yeah, it’s very interesting. You can say that digital technology has had a great impact on Chinese political society. You can see at the end of the film during the demolition process, there are so many cameras on the scene. That means that there are some cameras from the police station, some from our team, some from NGO organisations. The digital technology has brought some opportunity to the people to document history by themselves. This is a great change in China. Before that, history only had one version, by the Chinese Communist Party, but now with digital technology history has different versions. History has a Zhang Jinli version, a Security Bureau version… there’s a lot of different versions, not just one version. That is a great progress in the political situation in China.
Taken from CinemaTalk: A Conversation with Ou Ning by Dan Edwards
Notes on the artist Zheng Yunhan
Zheng’s work deals with the relationship between the Chinese people and their landscapes, it’s idealised nature as a site for forming, as man-perfected/adjusted material, a symbolic residue or site of potential for human activity.
His works stem from an investigation of his home town of Jixi, a mining town in NE China. Jixi Research Project, ongoing since 2004, is a documentary-like archive of visual and spoken records of the lives of the people living in this town dominated by mining and the consequences of this industry on their lives and landscape. This piece is presented as a 4-channel projection with interactivity, emphasising the audiences participation in the story telling process.
For Sunflower Project, Zheng commissioned his family and friends to plant a large field of sunflowers in the hills surrounding the town of Jixi. The resulting artwork is an ultra-high resolution composite photograph of this field. On the one side in the distance is Jixi and on the other a memorial marking a mass grave of locals killed by the Japanese Army during the occupation of China during the Second World War. The sunflowers act as physical link between the living and the dead, a route of remembrance, reflecting during their short lives the remains of life and death all around them.
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