ISEA2016 Art Event Overview

ISEA2016 Residency Programme Exhibition 20 May – 4 July, chi K11 art space

Since 2004, Videotage’s unique residency programme FUSE has brought together artists, curators, researchers, engineers, technologists, mak­ers, bloggers, environmentalists, activists with the aim to explore the synergy among divergent modes of knowledge production. This year, as one of the main organisers of ISEA2016, Videotage collaborated with the K11 Art Foundation to scale up FUSE and bring the participating art­ists to the city of Wuhan, the most populous city in Central China. Carlos Castellanos, Elena Knox, Hiram Wong and artist/technologist duo Re­becca Caines and John Campbell who have been selected from the open call, and stayed at the Kll art village in Wuhan have demonstrated a wide range of interests in employing artistic and technological solutions to address environmental, cultural, communicative and social issues. The works produced during their residency (Jan-May 2016) are exhibited as Re: FUSE at K11 Hong Kong from May 20th to July 4th, 2016.

Co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and Videotage, Re: FUSE is an exhibition, showcasing the results of FUSE ISEA2016HK Residency Programme. It includes Office of Environmental Experiments (OEE), exploring the coexistence of nature and technology; Improvised Remembering: Noise into Signal, a work interacting with the emotions of the audience; The Gynoid’s Guide to Continuous Service, exploring the philosophy of society and gender; and The Only Thing We Share is the Past, a work allowing instant communication between Hong Kong and Wuhan.

Re: FUSE is a part of K11’s Electronic Vibes. During 18 May to 4 July, international and local artists are invited to interpret electronic art with multi-discipline. The exhibition also presents a ground-breaking Art Jamming activity with the latest VR gear HTC VIVE, generate a revolutionary experience of juxtaposing virtual reality and art.

Artists: Carlos Castellanos / Elena Knox / Hiram Wong / John Campbell and Rebecca Caines.

Including a performance by Christian Clark, Tobias Klein and Tomas Laurenzo: Awkward Consequence

Curators Statement 

ISEA2016 Parallel Programme. Presented at ISEA2016 in cooperation with CityU School of Creative Media. Exhibition venue: City University of Hong Kong

The Digital Synesthesia exhibition is shown at ISEA2016 in Hong Kong from May 17 to 22, 2016. The show is on display at City University Hong Kong which has been a co-operation partner of the Vienna based research project.

A Preview Reception was organised on May 16, with a Welcoming Address by Michael Kratzer, acting Consul General of Austria and introductions by Ruth Schnell and Romana Schuler.

In the frame of ISEA2016 in Hong Kong the Digital Synesthesia exhibition presents 14 artworks by Digital Synesthesia artists Anke Eckardt, Karl Heinz Jeron, kondition pluriel (Martin Kusch / Marie-Claude Poulin), Alan Kwan, Karen Lancel / Hermen Maat, Marcello Mercado, Ulla Rauter, Ruth Schnell, Jeffrey Shaw / Sarah Kenderdine, David Strang / Vincent Van Uffelen, Tamiko Thiel / Christoph Reiserer and Peter Weibel.The show is on display at City University Hong Kong which has been a cooperation partner of the Vienna based research project.

The three-year arts-based research project Digital Synesthesia (2013 – 2016) has been organized by the Department of Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria.
The inter- and trans-disciplinary project aimed at the exploration of the synesthetic capabilities of digital art and focused on its technological, medial and aesthetic conditions, which can provoke synesthetic experiences for non-synesthetes. Asa result, fourteen digital artworks of seventeen internationally renowned artists have been produced and now are presented in this ISEA2016 exhibition, either in their original or documentary versions.

Exhibition Concept: Katharina Gsollpointner, Ruth Schnell, Romana Schuler
Exhibition Design: Wolfgang Fiel

Curatorial Board:

• Katharina Gsöllpointner
• Ruth Schnell
• Romana Schuler
• Jeffrey Shaw
• Peter Weibel

Supported by the Austrian Embassy

Gallery360 is the CityU School of Creative Media’s immersive 360-de­gree stereoscopic visualization environment, which has evolved from the groundbreaking AVIE system developed in 2006 at the UNSW iCinema Research Centre (Australia). Besides its landmark applications in digital cultural heritage, numerous internationally acclaimed research projects have explored its unique capabilities as a platform for artistic expres­sion, future cinema, and data visualization.

School of Creative Media, the region’s first such institution, located in the stunning, one-of-a-kind, building designed by the world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind (Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre), was founded to nurture a new generation of entrepreneurial interdisciplinary artists and creative media professionals, and to be a hub of innovation for the creative industries in Hong Kong, Mainland China, and abroad. The Creative Media Centre is named after Sir Run Run Shaw (1907 – 2014), who was a Hong Kong entertainment mogul and philanthropist. It was funded with a donation of HK$100 million from the Shaw Foundation. [sources scm.cityu.edu.hk and Wikipedia].

Giuseppe Castiglione – Lang-Shining New Media Art Exhibition” combines analog and digital technologies to present the masterpieces of Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), an Italian Jesuit missionary who became a highly influential painter at the imperial court of the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperors. This exhibition results from a unique collaboration between City University of Hong Kong and the National Palace Museum, representing a milestone in cultural exchange between Taiwan and Hong Kong.The exhibition’s innovative design combines historical artworks, new media and contemporary interactive art to create a compelling, multi-sensory, visitor experience. Full-size facsimiles of Castiglione’s paintings, famous for their merging of Eastern and Western styles, are presented side by side with creative, digital interpretations of these works. The result is a fascinating meeting of traditional and contemporary models of representation.

The presence of Jesuits such as Castiglione, both in Beijing and in other major Chinese cities, resulted in new artistic practices and in a sharing of Eastern and Western philosophical, scientific, and artistic knowledge. In the “Castiglione in Context” section, the exhibition makes visible, through porcelains, prints, paintings, and publications, the intellectual and artistic exchanges occurring between European Jesuit missionaries and the late Ming and Qing courts from the seventeenth through to the twentieth centuries.
The exhibition’s engaging and stimulating synthesis of historical works, media art and cutting-edge technology represents a benchmark for public museum experiences in the new digital era.

Castiglione In Context
This accompanying exhibition enables visitors to understand the intellectual and cultural context within which Giuseppe Castiglione (Lang-Shining) produced his highly influential artwork. Through prints, early books, porcelain, and paintings, viewers can see the significant role played by Jesuit missionaries, such as Castiglione, in the late Ming and Qing dynasties. Invited by the emperors, Castiglione and other Jesuits put their scientific and artistic skills to work for the imperial court. Their presence both inside and outside of the Beijing court initiated the first sharing of Eastern and Western philosophical and scientific knowledge as well as the development of new artistic practices. While the Jesuits introduced European artistic naturalism and perspective to the Chinese court artists, they in turn exposed the Jesuits to new artistic technologies such as silk-making and porcelain. The exhibition demonstrates this ongoing exchange in Chinese porcelains made for European export with European forms and scenes; in translations of seminal texts into each other’s languages (Euclid and Confucius shown here); in the production of the first topographic map of a country; and of course in Castiglione’s famous paintings, which blend European naturalism and Chinese landscape aesthetic. The exhibition concludes with the 1938 “Portrait of Matteo Ricci,” attributed to Xu Beihong, testifying to the significance of the Jesuit influence through the twentieth century.

承蒙以下機構盛情借出珍藏展品，謹此致謝
We would like to thank the following institutions for generously loaning objects for the exhibition:

香港大學美術博物館 The University of Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery
香港大學圖書館 The University of Hong Kong Libraries
香港科技大學 Hong Kong University of Technology and Science
香港中文大學 Chinese University of Hong Kong
香港海事博物館 Hong Kong Maritime Museum

The exhibition Just Dig/It! presents for the first time as large-scale installations, Inside the Tunnel under the Atlantic (1995) and Inside the Paris-New Delhi Tunnel (1997). Presented will also be Tunnel Shots, produced at the Pompidou Center during the exhibition of Tunnel under the Atlantic (1995), never before shown to the public.

These four short works and three excerpts of longer works were created in art residencies at Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology (SAT). Founded in 1996, SAT is a non-profit organization recognized internationally for its active, leading role in developing immersive technologies, augmented reality and creative use of high-speed networks. Its premises harbours the SATOSPHERE, a permanent modular dome, dedicated to the development and presentation of 360° immersive experiences.

www.sat.qc.ca

CUPOLA is a visualization dome developed at the CityU SCM Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALIVE)

Curator Statement
Videotage is pleased to announce that the retropective exhibition No References. A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985 has successfully opened. The exhibition lasts to June 15, 2016.

The significance of history lies first and foremost in its relevance to the present. When triggered by events in our daily lives, we can’t help but revisit times and happenings from past eras, hoping to be enlightened and inspired by reevaluations and reconstructions of overrused narratives, forgotten histories and odd fragments long lost in the river of time. The more pressing the circumstances of the present, the louder the echoes of history and the stronger the resonance of the past.

Such has been the situation in Hong Kong in the past two years. An urgency has been steadily building momentum—taking fuel from frustrating political realities, rapid societal polarisation as well as the fraught development of the local art infrastructure. One of the most pressing and complicated challenges is that of contextualizing local artistic production with an appropriate historical perspective: while it has become commonplace to tackle the question of “Hong Kong” in art, it is a different thing to analyze such attempts in a lucid and historically-informed manner.

The development of the contemporary art scene in Hong Kong is inextricably linked to the development of video art in the region. In the early 1980s, under the influence of Hong Kong new wave cinema, a group of young artists began their initial explorations in video art with elementary and unsophisticated means. In 1986, some of these pioneering artists (members of Zuni Icosahedron at the time) came together to establish Videotage, undertaking the mission of developing new media art in Hong Kong. Represented by Danny Yung, Ellen Pau, May Fung, Mo Man-yu and Wong Chi-fai, these artists introduced the form and spirit of video art to Hong Kong at a time when there was no artistic precedent, institutional support or any sort of public interest. At a time when the concept of media art had yet to be clearly defined, the young medium was challenged, moulded and incrementally developed via illuminating experiments and crossovers with other art forms such as dance, painting, installation and theatre.

The task of chronicling the 30-year history and development of media art in Hong Kong is not an easy feat. This exhibition attempts to look back, reflect and re-evaluate Hong Kong media art with a fresh methodology—one that is based on a critical historical perspective rather than the technological development of various mediums. Furthermore, history itself is dissected and re-contextualized. Traditional accounts of Hong Kong divides its contemporary history into discrete periods, namely: the end of the British occupation; the transitional era after its handover to China; and the issue of Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, etc. While such chronologies foreground core values of democracy and nativeness, they inevitably simplify the complexities and problematics that interweave art, social life and ideological discourse.
Using the institutional history of Videotage as an alternative guiding chronology, this exhibition presents a Hong Kong media art based on No References. Since its conception, media art in Hong Kong has been a melting pot for diverse perspectives and influences, it has always been adopting an open and humble learning attitude towards audiences, critics and members of the public from within and beyond the city. Over the years, Hong Kong artists learned how to transform their anger and frustrations into a form of creative resistance, while not abandoning the appeal of breaking away from collective identity. Their efforts present a combined struggle against singularity and univerality with enormous power and potential.

No References revolves around the notion of subjectivity: in revisiting history we explore the development of subjective consciousness and its relationship to larger enveloping narratives. This subjectivity, as expressed in this exhibition, is based on hospitality to the Other and struggle against singularity and universality: a situation of refusion and refusal, in which Hong Kong media artists practice. An art subject or concept never exists in a vacuum; it is always deeply interwoven within specific geographical, historical and sociopolitical contexts. At the same time, such concepts arise without precedent or example, born out of history while seeking to change the status quo. In their quest for new orders and new ways of living, such new subjectivities refuse to be subsumed within existing social structures; nor do their efforts fully reflect dominant narratives and histories. This is the reason why we cannot generalize a Hong Kong identity or history based solely on political developments or external identities: such accounts omit the individual exploration, the inter-individual inspiration that foretell and pre-date the actual happenings.

Presenting works by pioneering video artists whom have attempted to self-organize and inspire each other in their collective goal of developing media art in Hong Kong forms a conceptual and literal point of departure of the exhibition. In Unit 12 at Cattle Depot, the works display an intriguing interrelationship between interindividual inspiration and independent creativity that manifests in a transgressive historical consciousness—one that transcends the limitations of media as well as personal and social boundaries. It is in this way that subjective consciousness infiltrates and transforms artistic, social and political dialogue through a wide range of media practices. In Unit N2, N5 and Unit 13, we strive to present the complexity that is deeply rooted in and unique to Hong Kong media art. From media experiments to institutional critique and from sociopolitical views to private personal desires, the exhibition constructs a space that interweaves diverse fragments and stories. At the same time, adopting an investigative archival approach, we also endeavour to discuss about the event of documenting media works as a “re-mediatizing” process.

 [source: .e-flux.com/announcements/50443/no-references]

Researcher And Co-Curator: Phoebe Wong

Artist’s Talks:  Danny Yung & Ellen Pau

Performances:  MMI (Moving Moving Images)

Workshop:  Lam Miu-ling & Albert Yu Ka-ho

Exhibition Venue: Cattle Depot Artist Village

Su Wei (China) is an independent curator who now splits his time between Beijjing and Hong Kong. scmp.com/culture/arts-entertainment/article/1945667/no-blinkers-hong-kong-history-retold-through-video-art

Satellite Event: Exhibition: The 5th Large-Scale Public Media Arts Exhibition: Human Vibrations, Presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council

International artists: Laurent Mignonneau &Christa Sommerer

Local artists: Isaac Chong Wai, Jaffa Lam Learn, Jason Lam Chi Fai & Sampson Wong Yu Hin, Cedric Maridet, Kingsley Ng Siu King

Curator: Ms. Caroline Ha Thuc

Presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), the “5th Large-Scale Public Media Art Exhibition: Human Vibrations” curated by independent curator Ms. Caroline Ha Thuc was held from 18 May to 22 June 2016. The project has invited two world-renowned media artists, Laurent Mignonnneau (France) & Christa Sommerer (Austria), as well as four local artists, Isaac Chong Wai, Jaffa Lam Laam, Cédric Maridet, and Kingsley Ng Siu King, to showcase different kinds of interactive media artworks at various locations in Hong Kong, encouraging the public to experience the invisible frequencies and also questioning their impact on our daily lives. During the exhibition period, a series of educational programmes such as artist symposium, artist workshops and docent tours are organised to promote public understanding of media arts. [source: appadvice.com/app/human-vibrations]

Programme:

1. Cédric Maridet — Archipelodio
2. Isaac Chong Wai — One Sound of the Futures
3. Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer — Fly High: Time Flies
4. Kingsley Ng Siu King — 25 Minutes Older
5. Jaffa Lam Laam — I’m listening, heartbeating, handworking

A 6th work, by Sampson Wong & Jason Lam, originally named ‘Our 60-second friendship begins now’ was cancelled by the curators, who declared, in a press release that “The original work (…) was selected and recommended by the independent Curator Ms Caroline Ha Thuc, endorsed by the Advisory Committee of the Exhibition chaired by Ms Ellen Pau. After the opening ceremony of the Exhibition held on 18 May 2016, the artists changed the title [now titled Countdown Machine] and statement of their work, and publicised these changes, without consulting the curator nor HKADC”. The curators stated that this “demonstrated disrespect”. hkadc.org.hk/en/whats-on/press-release/joint-statement

• The Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC) is a statutory body in Hong Kong tasked with development of the arts in the territory. The ADC was created in 1995, under the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Ordinance, Chapter 472, replacing the former Council of Performing Arts. It advises the government on cultural policy for Hong Kong and allocates grants, undertakes advocacy, promotion and development, and plans programmes, in support of the arts. [source: Wikipedia]

Curator Statement

ISEA2016 Hong Kong in partnership with the OPEN SKY PROJECT – a collaborative project between City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media and International Commerce Centre (Sun Hung Kai Properties) – offered an opportunity for artists to present their video projects on the 77,000 sqm of urban media screen that makes up the façade of the highest tower in Hong Kong : the ICC (484m). The open call is a joint project between ISEA2016 SCM Open Sky Project and Human Vibrations exhibition/HKADC.

We are happy to announce that 73 anonymized artworks were reviewed by a board of 11 international expert juries through which we have selected 6 Official selections. Due to the quality of the submission, the Jury agreed to awarding 22 Honorable Mentions for ISEA2016 Open Sky Call.

Special thank you to:
School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Sun Hung Kai Properties

Curator Statement

ISEA2016 Hong Kong in partnership with the OPEN SKY PROJECT – a collaborative project between City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media and International Commerce Centre (Sun Hung Kai Properties) – offered an opportunity for artists to present their video projects on the 77,000 sqm of urban media screen that makes up the façade of the highest tower in Hong Kong : the ICC (484m). The open call is a joint project between ISEA2016 SCM Open Sky Project and Human Vibrations exhibition/HKADC.

We are happy to announce that 73 anonymized artworks were reviewed by a board of 11 international expert juries through which we have selected 6 Official selections. Due to the quality of the submission, the Jury agreed to awarding 22 Honorable Mentions for ISEA2016 Open Sky Call.

Special thank you to:
School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Sun Hung Kai Properties