the lights will take you home 隨光尋家
— 2024
“Neon signs were not just a part of the backdrop to my childhood, but they also served as guides and landmarks to help me get home.”
— Brian Sze-hang Kwok, Fading Neon Lights: An Archive of Hong Kong’s Visual Culture
“If orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions, of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear a common ground, where we can find hope in what goes astray.”
— Sara Ahmed, Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology
the lights will take you home 隨光尋家 is a media art installation piece, with 3D animation projected onto two perpendicular walls, presented with an immersive soundscape. Four panels of ceiling-to-floor tulle are suspended within the installation space, representing the fading and obstruction of memory.
The piece revolves around my personal experience of feeling lost and disoriented. I grew up in Hong Kong until I left for university in the States at the age of 18. I then transferred to the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) amidst political turbulence in Hong Kong and a global pandemic. In the span of four years, I had 15 different living spaces. Therefore, “home” for me has changed rapidly in a short period of time. When Hong Kong — the most constant home I’ve had — starts to disintegrate in my mind’s eye, what is home?
the lights will take you home 隨光尋家 is an amalgamation of the many feelings that I’ve had in recent years, feelings that I’ve found difficult to fully articulate. It’s a story about migration, loss, belonging. A love letter, a farewell letter, to Hong Kong. An expression of gratitude for community and the people who have lit my path. An attempt to grapple with graduation. Finally, a reassurance that as long as we follow the light, we will eventually find our ways to new homes.
Capstone project for the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) Bachelor of Media Studies program
Exhibited at Context Not Included (April 19-26, 2024)
In the Doorway
— 2024
“If I stand in the doorway and don’t go through, I can see both rooms. Great advantage, just standing in the doorway.”
— Fred Wah, “Fred Wah – Standing in the Doorway – the Hyphen in Chinese-Canadian Poetry”
“In the Doorway” was created for the Press Play Augmented Reality Stream at The AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, with audio by Kai Hagen. The animation can be viewed using the Artivive app. It is currently being displayed along the Art Walk in the Cultural District of downtown Kelowna, and will continue to be up for a year.
The piece draws from Chinese-Canadian poet Fred Wah’s work around hybridity. In “Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity,” Wah refers to the language that his father spoke as the “nine-toned air,” which indicates that his father spoke Cantonese. As a Hong Konger who grew up in a Cantonese and English-speaking environment, I share a similar sense of hybridity with Wah.
With Wah’s artistic medium being writing, and with this shared background in Cantonese and English, I decided to use language as the central motif of “In the Doorway.” I translated Wah’s poem “Between You and Me There is an I” into Cantonese, and wrote both versions on paper, which I then ripped up to create elements on both sides of the door. This illustrates the East-West binary that we are often driven to view the world through.
Elements that are in the doorway, however, have 粵拼 (jyutping) written on them. 粵拼 is the Cantonese romanization system, used as a way to demonstrate how words are pronounced using the Roman script. I view 粵拼 as the linguistic representation of hybridity — to be able to read it, one has to understand the Roman script. To be able to comprehend it though, one has to understand Cantonese. To fully wield 粵拼, one has to position themselves in the doorway between languages, in a way that rejects either end of the East-West binary.