I have long taken the idea of being a Hongkonger as natural and granted, but this has been shaken after a journey to the United States. I enjoy the days in foreign countries and am open to be acculturated and enculturated by a diversity of cultures. One unexpected side-effect brought by those encounters would be the estrangement of the idea of ‘self’, ‘ego’ or ‘self-identity’. With the facilitated communication across cultures, the identity of ‘self’ categorized under nationalities and ethnicities have both become a blurred concept. How can we describe the differences between ‘myself’ and ‘themselves’? Where is the line that draws ‘ourselves’ and ‘themselves’? How do we develop our perception of ‘myself’?

  ‘Q and A’ is the question-and-answer section about identities. I invited expatriates to read out the Q and A lines in Cantonese. The first row of subtitles comes from the movies that portray the idea of identity. Questions and answers are unrelated but both draw from the movies related to identity recognition, and they are juxtaposed to create identity confusion. For example, A asked ‘Do you think your voice sounds hesitating?” and B answered “You can choose to leave Hong Kong but Hong Kong won’t leave you.” (lines from the movie Helios) The expatriates communicating in Cantonese is to emphasise the sense of deviation between ethnicities and languages, and to highlight different understanding of self-identity arising from appearance and ego.

The second row of subtitles is actually the version heard by Sandro, who is a Italian-HongKong biracial. Born in Belgium but raised in Hong Kong, he is unproficient in Cantonese but who has a Hongkonger appearance. How shall him identify himself – a Hongkonger, Italian, Belgian, or others? The version that he heard has a fairly great difference with the original meaning of the sentences. For example, the line “I have nothing to tell but express my congratulations” was misheard and misinterpreted as “I am going to use the public toilets”. The discrepancy is a representation and manifestation of the blurriness of self-identification and the importance of how languages construct self-identities.

Upon the creation of this series of work, I have discovered and realised profound implications on the idea of self, the relationship about how self connects and interacts with conceptions of languages and ethnicities. Last but not least, our society can still ask more questions of how art conveys these ideas.

Q & A

The noblest pain

Water bottles, seawater from Hong Kong and Germany, texts, videoloop, parcel

6 x 6 x 23 cm, 7 x 7 x 24cm, Varible, 14 x 10 cm, 2’30 min, 36 x 25 x 21 cm

2017

‘Sea project’ is initiated by my nostalgia to my homeland, Hong Kong. I have moved to Germany for more than two years. I always miss the sea in Hong Kong. Thus, I posted the seawater from Hong Kong to Germany and then poured some into the Baltic Sea, Germany. I also collected some seawater from the Baltic Sea into a water bottle. Through putting the bottles of seawater from Hong Kong and Germany together, the limitation of space is eliminated; two seas are next to each other.
The project also discovers stories of the two seas. I found that they have similar stories about people escaping from Communist Party or DDR to another countries. Inspired by these incidents happened in both Hong Kong and Germany, I wrote two texts about them. Two places are then connected with the similar stories of each sea.





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