Contextual Statement
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless___ Like water… be water, my friend.” A quote from Bruce Lee that is commonly used in the Hong Kong protests as being resilient and able to adapt to different conditions. Rethinking different ways of protesting, art is a fluid medium to visualize people’s thoughts to allow them to be seen.
My art practice stems around the idea of a silenced voice and a silent protest towards the political situation in Hong Kong (the National Security Law (NSL)). Under the law, a person could get arrested by voicing out opinions, slogans that incites to overthrow the state. From 30th June till late September, at least 28 people were arrested under NSL including politicians and tycoons.[1] Recently under the ruling of the National Security Law, 12 youths were detained in China while fleeing to Taiwan, 71 days and ongoing.
Silence is often perceived as an indication that everything is alright. Yet being silent under an oppressive political situation is a way of survival, to avoid conflict or to protect a person’s identity. Sometimes what one would consider the safest place could also be the most dangerous space. However, when a place is pressured under tyranny and is forced to deal with daily absurdity, does one remain silent and pretend everything is normal?
The left-hand series of portrait drawings represents the Hong Kong protestors that I interviewed. These works are a reflection of how the Hong Kongers situate themselves throughout the protesting period. In response, my characters play as a stand-out and protection of the interviewee’s identity. For the right- hand series, it documents my state of being throughout the period being overseas. In a way, the drawings are thoughts that could not easily be transformed into words and said out loud. I see these characters as my communicators as they are capable of transforming the unspoken into a legible medium.
Under political scenarios, we tend to narrow ourselves down. Our visions would become more and more tapered. The Landscape drawing is a configuration of perspectives in a bigger picture that includes snapshots from reality and an imaginative dimension of reflections. It documents not only from a personal perspective but also a wider angle that is seen by a group of Hong Kongers.
A voice consists of words and language. A lot of my interviewees (including me) believed the most empowering way to express oneself is to speak and write. However, responding to the HK political climate (eg.NSL) where one’s voice is suppressed and silenced by the government, how could a voice be delivered as effectively as how one speaks and writes? In George Steiner’s book “Silence and Language” explains the empowerment of presenting political issues through poetry “Silence is an alternative…nothing speaks louder than the unwritten (poem).”[2] It seeks the depths of how a language or a complicated thought could be expressed through drawing. It is recorded, and the memory will remain.
‘‘By voicing the silent and the silenced, it seeks to propel them {those who have been silenced} into the space of representation that is also the space of remembrance’ [3]
May the silenced protest be heard and remembered.
香港人, 今宵多珍重。
[1] Helen Davidson, Andy Ball, “The arrested: Hongkongers caught up in Beijing’s national security law,” The guardian, September 29, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/sep/29/the-hong-kong-arrested.
[2] George Steiner, Language and Silence (London: Faber and Faber, 80, 2010) https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=AiTAnrY2rKkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[3] Candela Delgado, Marin, “Dignity and voice in silence: contemporary female visual artists’ quiet empathy, (July 2017): 67-79, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2017.1347889?scroll=top&needAccess=true.