Mobile M+: Live Art

Upon entering the exhibition space, one encountered Hong Kong artist Young Hay’s Bonjour, Young Hay (After Courbet) (1995). Three large-format, black-and-white photographs, shot at iconic locations in Hong Kong, document the artist’s four-hour walk from Mong Kok to Central in 1995, which he did with a blank canvas strapped to his back. The odd appearance of a stark, white space in the photos—the canvas—tells of Young’s attempt to reclaim artistic space in the dense urban landscape, where commercial ownership continues to dominate.

Meanwhile, shown at the center of the exhibition space was Guangzhou-born Lin Yilin’s Drive Shaft (1996), a three-hour-long video of the artist moving a cinderblock wall, which is written on with names of politicians, through the streets of Hong Kong. In transforming the wall into a “social construction,” Lin also removes the components of its “physical construction”; by constantly transporting it to the next destination in various pieces, the words on the wall become shuffled and previously recognizable names are rendered meaningless. Nearly 20 years later, and in the aftermath of the city’s recent “Umbrella Movement,” Lin’s concern with Hong Kong politics resonates more than ever. 

On display in a dimly lit room was Beijing-based Hu Xiangqian’s new work Reconstructing Michelangelo (2015), a six-channel video installation documenting the months Hu spent conveying knowledge and advice to his assistant about the condition of “being a contemporary artist.” In consciously performing the role of a mentor, Hu further challenges the boundaries of live art by delving into the process of “editing” a performance artist. In the dialogue between Hu and his assistant, the artist points out that philosophy and art are intertwined and that contemporary art should provoke critical thinking.

Another exhibition under the “Mobile M+: Live Art” series took place in the Cattle Depot Artist Village and was centered around the rarely seen installation Writings through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1987) by the late American artist and composer John Cage (1912–1992). Inside one of the village’s distinctive red-brick buildings sat the installation, which consists of 36-channel sound recordings, 24 theatrical lights being played out according to instructions generated by the Chinese classic I-Ching (Book of Changes) and 6 locally sourced chairs. Cage’s fascination with chance operations, derived from the notion of non-intentionality in Zen Buddhism, laid at the heart of the show. By using I-Ching as a mechanism to filter out his own intention, Cage managed to transcend his personal preference in conceiving a work, making it something more akin to an act of nature. In fact, each new iteration of the installation takes on a site-specific quality and generates a unique experience for viewers.

The element of empty space was a recurring theme in Cage’s works. While his most famous musical composition 4’33” (1952) consists entirely of silence, in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, the random play of sounds and lights—spread out at various distances and distinct from one another, yet converging and echoing at the point where the audience stands—seemed to give the empty space its definition and possibilities. By using American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience (1849) as source text to create mesostic poems (in which Cage’s reading of them was manipulated by pitch and speed), Cage was perhaps suggesting that, in a politically empty space where a government “governs least,” individuals, like sounds, can exist perfectly in their own distinctive ways, and also commingle with others.

Only a ferry ride away across the Kowloon Bay was the exhibition “Frog King Kwok and Eiko Otake” at Connecting Space in North Point. Kwok’s installation Time (2015) is an accumulation of media material—gleaned and gathered from physical sources like newspapers or virtual ones in cyberspace—chronicling the artist’s five-decade-long practice. A fishing net carries all these clippings and print-outs, tossed together in nonchronological order “like an Internet search engine,” per the curatorial text. Accompanying Time was a digital slideshow of images documenting performances by New York-based Japanese artist and dancer Eiko Otake. These images are part of the Fukushima chapter of Otake’s ongoing collaboration with photographer William Johnston, entitled “A Body in Places” (2014– ). A Body in Fukushima (2015 0519) (2015) was produced in areas ravaged by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. Through Otake’s slow yet controlled, tense but exquisite movements, she channels the mourning, anguish and grief felt in the deserted, radioactive land.

The three exhibitions at Sheung Wan Civic Centre, Cattle Depot Artist Village and Connecting Space explored various aspects of “liveness” in performance art. Here, art was recast as active communication rather than passive interpretation, process rather than form.