Public programs

AFTERIMAGE Celebration Event and Panel Discussion

A celebratory launch event will be held for the Arts West Gallery current exhibition Afterimage: New Media Art in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan on Friday 2 June.

Artists Ellen Pau, Linda Chiu-han Lai and exhibition curator Genevieve Trail will join in conversation with the founding director of Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) Dr Kim Machan to discuss the exhibition Afterimage: New Media Art in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This conversation will be followed by a catered reception in the foyer of Arts West, with an opportunity to view the exhibition.

Date:       Friday 2 June 2023

Time:      6:00pm - 9:00pm

Host:       School of Culture and Communication

Location: Forum Theatre (153), Arts West - North Wing (148A)

Cost:        Free, bookings essential.

Linda Chiu-han Lai 黎肖嫻 (b. 1957), historian, writer and research-based interdisciplinary artist, devotes herself to intermedia arts, Critical Theory and media archaeology, as meaningful extension of her PhD training in Cinema Studies.

She persists in artistic creation as the practice of theory. A critical researcher in the History of Everyday Life, she seeks organological views of art’s relation to other existential domains. At the School of Creative Media (1998-2023), she designed inter-disciplinary courses on the criticality of micro/meta narrativity, new materialism’s contribution to media archaeology as historiography, automatism in pre-digital and digital artmaking, visual ethnography, sound art, and generative art and literature. Micro Narratives, a signature course of hers, integrates interdisciplinary theories in a laboratory context of videographic experiments, which has proliferated into two editions of “video manifestos,” involving about 60 young artists in writing about their own works, and an ongoing online video zine, D-Normal/V-Essay, a participatory project that gathers short video pieces from artists and non-artists through open call and curation.

As a montage artist, she considers images material facts as much as rich perceptual surfaces, defying the figuration-abstraction split. Her videos have appeared in documentary and experimental venues, including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Traverse Video (Toulouse), LOOP Barcelona, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), and the Asian experimental film/video circuit in Seoul (EXiS), Taipei (EXiT), Macao (EXiM), and Kuala Lumpur (KLEX). C3A (Cordoba, Spain) held her video art retrospective in 2021, after dedicated solo features in EXiM (2015) and EXiS (2017).

Her works have been acquired by M+ (2019), Video Bureau (2015), and the Power Station of Art. She was “Artist of the Year 2017 – Media Art” (Hong Kong Arts Development Council). In 2022, online video zine D-Normal/V-Essay was a winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the Art(ists) Initiative (Linz).

Dr Kim Machan is a video and media arts specialist, curator, writer and founding director of the not-for-profit arts organisation MAAP-Media Art Asia Pacific. She has researched, curated, produced, and commissioned media arts projects in Australia and the Asia regions through this organisation since 1998. In 2021 she completed her Phd by exhibition and thesis titled Refocusing on the Medium: the Rise of East Asia Video Art presented in China: OCAT Shanghai. 2020-21 https://vimeo.com/526364077 and Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, 2022 https://vimeo.com/691701584. She has negotiated complex curatorial projects working with museums, galleries, contemporary art spaces, universities and non-traditional art settings in Australia and the Asia Pacific regions working with institutions such as the China Millennium Monument Art Museum, the National Art Museum of China, and the National Library of China in Beijing; the Shanghai Library; OCAT Shanghai; the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; the Singapore Art Museum; Nam June Paik Art Centre, and Art Sonje Art Center, Seoul amongst others. Machan has lectured in curatorial masterclasses, and contemporary Asian art, in universities and art schools in Australia, China and Singapore. Details of these and other projects can be found along with edited publications at www.maap.org.au

Ellen Pau 鮑藹倫 (b. 1961) is a pioneering member of Hong Kong’s new media and video art scene, whose work explores the values embedded in technology and its modes of communicating them. In tandem, a running theme and important motif throughout Pau’s thirty years of practice is her concern with Hong Kong’s political climate, social livelihood and the changes of urban lives. Besides her profession and artistic practice, Pau has been a key figure in the promotion, curation and education of art and culture in Hong Kong. In 1986, she co-founded Videotage, Hong Kong’s oldest video artist collective and earliest archive for media art, with Wong Chi-fai, May Fung and Comyn Mo. In 1996, she founded Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, an annual event that consists of exhibitions, conferences, seminars, and workshops, bringing art experiences to thousands of Hong Kong audiences. In 2014, Pau was appointed by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council as a representative of the Art Form Group in Film and Media Arts, and in the same year, she also served on the interim acquisition committee of M+ in West Kowloon Cultural District. Pau’s works have been extensively exhibited worldwide in film festivals and art exhibitions, including Hong Kong International Film Festival (1990, 1993, 1997 & 2000), 8th International Film Festival for Women (Spain, 1992), Copenhagen Cultural Capital Foundation, Container 96 (Denmark, 1996), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Lisbon, 1996), Johannesburg Biennale (1997), Gwangju Biennial (2002), Liverpool Biennial (2003), Sydney International Film Festival (2004), among others. In 2001, Recycling Cinema, as one of her most significant video installations, was first presented at Hong Kong Pavilion in the 49th Venice Biennale.

Genevieve Trail is an art historian and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines emergence of contemporary Hong Kong art through the 1970s and 1980s in an international context, with a particular focus on mediums of installation, video and performance art. Her writing has been published in journals including Art + Australia, Art Monthly Australasia, Currents Journal and Di'van: a Journal of Accounts and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art amongst others. In 2021 she co-edited a special issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art with Dr Claire Roberts and Dr Mark K. Erdmann, 'Shifting the Ground: Rethinking Chinese Art'. Her curatorial projects include All elements speak their own language: Hong Kong video art, 1980-1989 (2022) and Afterimage: New Media Art in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (2023).

AFTERIMAGE: NEW MEDIA ART IN CHINA, HONG KONG AND TAIWAN | 残像 中 ‧港 ‧台新媒体艺术 | 殘像 中 ‧港 ‧台新媒體藝術

Over the past one hundred years, the Greater China region — encompassing China, Hong Kong and Taiwan — has undergone significant transformation, from war and revolution to economic reform, globalisation and the ongoing legacies of colonial rule. New media artists have grappled with these social and political uncertainties by interweaving history and memory, fabrication and futurity, in the process of articulating new media’s own historical consciousness.

Spanning the first generation of video art to emerge in the 1980s through to contemporary works, Afterimage explores the ways in which artists have used languages of new media to remediate collective histories and personal memories; appropriate, deconstruct and subvert languages of power and the mass media; engage and empower communities and speculate alternative futures.