Exhibition
CINEMA 2.0 Media Arts Exhibition: Illuminating Vacuum
The relationship between the screen and film is always paradoxical. It is a thing that enables us to see a film, but is also something that we normally do not see during the viewing experience. It is an “invisible” medium. The screen functions as a border between the two worlds, the physical / the real and the symbolic / the virtual, constantly reminding the audience what is being displayed on screen is merely a movie and a fantasy.
 
In the contemporary world, the electronic screens have become a universal interface for everyday life. Social media, being highly image-driven and short clips oriented, has reinforced the screens to serve as the indispensable vehicle of self-construction and self-expression. In this era of the pandemic, the functionality of screens has extended and amplified to an extent that has overflown to conceal its physicality.

In this edition of CINEMA 2.0: Illuminating Vacuum Media Arts Exhibition, with four different artworks, the complex relation of how the screen serves as a medium in the real world is re-examined.
 
Curator:
Ip Yuk-yiu
 
Featured Artists:
Joon Moon (South Korea)
Exonemo (Japan)
Akinori Goto (Japan)
Supported by
Curated By
Graphic and Spatial Design
Technical Support
2/3 (Thu) – 19/3 (Sun) | 12nn - 8pm | Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre | Free Admission
Hello, Shadow! (2018)
Joon Moon
(South Korea)
The work implements mixed reality using a shadow. The audience moves a lighting device to observe the shadow’s shapes generated by computer graphics, then get to understand the virtual world embedded in the shadows. At the boundary between imagination and reality, shadows evoke a unique fantasy and poetic emotion. The audience is allured to make eye contact with the virtual human of the shadow world.
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Kiss, or Dual Monitors (2017)
Exonemo
(Japan)
This work consists of two monitors, both showing a face with eyes closed and arranged in a way that makes them look like they are kissing. The work aims to evoke the sense of tactility, which is looming on the surface of devices in an age where information devices are becoming increasingly physical.
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Progress (2017)
Akinori Goto
(Japan)
A beam of light projected onto the artwork makes a walking person appear. As the beam of light spreads in a circle, the number of walking people increases. In the work, while the self splits with the passage of time, it continues toward amplification. Of the multiple selves that exist both physically and digitally at the same time, what do we use to establish the "true self" and which self would that be?
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Rediscovery of Anima (2018)
Akinori Goto
(Japan)
Trajectory of motion is given three-dimensional structure through wood and stone and comes to life when touched by a ray of sunlight. The work explores humankind's craving for the appearance of motion and interest in the presence of an anima, while imagining its relationship to the society and culture of the time. Then, in the present age, in which images are used heavily, the artist returns to our original sense and feeling for the appearance of motion.
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Curator’s Guided Tour: 11/3 (Sat) | 2pm | Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre | Cantonese | Free Registration (Limited Quota)
The 28th ifva Awards
Media Art Category Finalist Exhibition
The spectrum for medium of creation for media artworks is remarkably huge, from old FM channels, memory cards, large-scaled sculpture installation to immersive experiences, and the one hit wonder NFT trend. Ten media artworks from Asian region and Hong Kong demonstrate distinctive observations on personal emotions and universal issues.
Finalist Exhibition: 2/3 (Thu) - 19/3 (Sun) | 12nn - 8pm | Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre | Free Admission
A fable of a fable < Black-tailed gull >
couch
(Japan)
A kinetic installation telling a narrative through slit-animation. As multiple self-driving slits slowly pass in front of the drawings, the drawings depicting various times and spaces begin to move respectively at different moments. However, all images are connected as one whole narrative, and the narrative of the black-tailed gull is told as a fable with no beginning and no end.
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Active Statue
Beak Jung-ki
(South Korea)
The work is a sculpture made of metal, and the conductivity of metal makes it an active antenna for transmitting radio waves. The radio waves transmitted by the sculpture can be heard through the radio, and the sound from the radio is a voice that tells a short story created by Choi Chu-young and Ik Soo-kaay.
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Between Orifices
Cheung Hiu-tung
(Hong Kong)
This immersive video installation was inspired by my unfading trauma of being sexually assaulted. To seek for the most genuine approach, I freed myself from the limitation of words, and opened up my agonising memory with instinctive art experiments. The silent mouths forbid me to conceal myself with positivity. Standing between the bizarre mouths, I slowly admit the indelible agony.
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Dead End, 02
Mark Chung
(Hong Kong)
Reflections on the mirrored buildings are mangled; this verticality of power are illusions constructed upon an infinite tolerance of error; powers disturb our body and belief; gleaming light-emitting diodes negate every trickle of darkness, marginalising every molecule of filth to our peripheral vision; our silence perpetuates; we collectively uphold the beautiful fantasies before our eyes. Thoughts are burdens.
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FM108, to...
Chan Wai-sum, Leung Yiu-wa, Hui Chi-sang
(Hong Kong)
FM108, to... is a non-existing radio channel for us to share unheard messages, and grief about broken relationships. Its interactive device, taking the form of a see-saw, works as a radio tuned by the balancing motion. Two visitors riding on each end are immersed in radio noises, and as they cooperate, will finally listen to the hidden messages on FM108.
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Future_Forecast
Wu Ziyang、Mark Ramos
(China / United States)
Future_Forecast is a project that includes a live simulation + collective world building game, a CGI film, and NFT characters. They present and "predict" the evolution of cloud-networked societies in the developing world by looking at the effects of growing Internet-enabled networks and the ecological, geopolitical, and socio-cultural effects of a speculative future ISP and blockchain company in the Philippines.
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Humanoid Object #3
Min Chan-wook
(South Korea)
Nowadays machines are extending their roles and activities even into areas which have been considered unique to human beings. Humanoid Object #3 is a machine that creates scribbles on its own using AI technology. The generated scribbles express the thoughts and emotions of the machine.
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Imagraph
Goki Muramoto
(Japan)
Imagraph is a media apparatus that arbitrates between two primordial "attitudes" : projecting the images and closing the senses. Participants lie and shut their eyes. Two displays are suspended, with optical fibres from each pixel extending to the surface of their eyelids. The video prepared in advance is unilaterally played after the spectral compensation against the "blood-red" unique to their own flesh.
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Nothing Less
Colbie Fung
(Hong Kong)
Buried in piles of worn-out, used memory cards at street vendors of sorts, I found myself bearing invisible witness to memories of total strangers. I attempt to retrieve an accidentally deleted image from my childhood with memory cards that once belonged to strangers, consciously reinventing a curious compound of imagery, memory and the lack thereof as time unceasingly elapses.
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Stochastic Camera (version 0.2) - the Melting Crystal Ball
Chan Long-fung
(Hong Kong)
Stochastic Camera (version 0.2) revisits and rethinks the algorithmic logic of machine learning image processing. Over the period of eight days, artist records the melting ice ball in a black box and stable light for three hours, then writes two different equations to process the imagery data, representing the overall and individual autonomy respectively.
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Wend a Way
Media Arts Exhibition by Lau Ching-wa Jess
"Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.
 
ifva partners with Goethe-Institut Hongkong to present solo exhibitions for Media Art Category local awardees. This year the two parties will present the solo media arts exhibition "Wend a Way" of Jess Lau, the Gold Awardee of the 27th ifva Media Art Category, which reconstructs the memories of the city and moving bodies through a collection of new and old media artworks.
 
Jess Lau creates moving images through monotonous and repetitive motions to emphasise the relationship between moving images and the motions of bodies. Memories rest in places where stories are unfolded, be it a river, an avenue, a body or even a white wall. Viewers revisit the twisting and chaotic memories through the flowing of images to realise memories are now wending in an unfamiliar gesture, which reshape and reform to connect with the imagined.
10/2 (Fri) – 11/3 (Sat) |11am – 8pm (Mon) / 10am  8pm (Tue-Fri)/ 9:30am – 6pm (Sat) / Closed on Sundays and Public Holidays|Goethe-Gallery & Black Box Studio, Goethe-Institut Hongkong |Free Admission
 
Exhibition Opening:  11/2 (Sat) 3pm in the presence of the artist, with Opening Performance featuring Tsang Hoi-yu
The Cave with a Wheeze
20’00” in loop
2021
In this fixed-point stop-motion animation, ‘The Cave with a Wheeze,’ Lau draws one carbon-black being after another on a 2m x 3m white wall using charcoal. The beings walk from the edge to gather in the centre of the frame. Depicted, documented and erased – Lau repeats this cycle with each step of each being. The crowd of beings grows until the wall is filled with hundreds of them. Lau then begins wiping the charcoal dust with her hands, attempting to revert the wall back to its original white state. The clock in the upper left corner reflects the time in reality of Lau’s working (starting at noon), in parallel to the condensed time in the animation.
Sound: wo4
Title calligraphy: Lokto
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The Cinema of Walking: Airship
27’00” in loop
2020
In February 2020, Lau began shooting in Kyoto, recording people crossing the Kamogawa River by the stepping stones. To capture this, Lau positioned herself in the middle of the Nijo Bridge and pointed her camera north towards the stepping stones. She began shooting whenever someone stepped along the slope to the stones and stopped when they had left the frame. Lau recorded for four hours each day, capturing a total of 100 people crossing the Kamogawa River.
Title calligraphy: Wong Cheuk Win
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Red Lights Brake on Nathan Road
Multi-channel
2022
Using the Street View function of Google Maps, Lau walked back and forth in the virtual world of Nathan Road, collecting images of the red lights and street signs on Nathan Road, Hong Kong at different times. These images are presented in a dual-channel video installation. The time and space of Nathan Road is digitized and stored in the online world; Lau attempts to reconstruct her memory of the thoroughfare of the city via this digitization of images.
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Tempo: 1
2-channel /1’00” in loop
2022
‘Tempo: 1’ is a dual-channel video installation in which the two screens face each other in the space. One video presents a performer dressed in black, the other a performer dressed in white. Both play the classic hand clapping game, "Slide", which requires two people to play. The audience can hear the clapping colliding in the exhibition.
Performer: Chan Yeung
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Snowflake
1’00” in loop
2022
When an analogue TV does not get a signal, it produces a random pattern of pixel dots, creating white noise. For this piece, Lau drew 60 sketches of this static 'snowflake', shown on the digital TV installed in the Goethe Gallery at a high frame rate of 60 frames per second.
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Artist Biography
Lau Ching-wa Jess
Born in Hong Kong in 1991, Jess gained her BA in Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong in 2014. Jess' work applies themes such as narrative fragments, body memory and focus on iterative manual processes and the aggregation of time. Jess' work involves a wide range of media and explores the uniqueness and the malleability of each. Jess was the selected artist of Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists' Studio Residency 2020 and awarded the Nanying Prize from Taiwan 2022. Jess is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from the department of Sinophone Literatures, NDHU.
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