The Fault Zone

In Qu Chang’s To the Countryside (2021), she takes apart the complexity of feeling empathy in response to the Hong Kong’s recent state of flux. The video essay, fashioned as a response letter to the essays of Hao and Su, takes place in the Yuen Long countryside of Hong Kong where Qu recently moved to. The idyllic rurality permits a strange disconnection from the events in the city and prompts a distant reflection on the emotional psychology of activist movements. When she moved to the countryside, it was marketed as a place of purity, but the countryside is not without complexity as property developers intervene with New Territory land rights, swaying personal interests and political leanings. She explores affection, and the way it fuels and alters the narrative of violence, how our facade of rationality can be interrupted as situations trigger us to feel emotionally charged.

Moving to Berlin in the beginning of 2020 for the year-long DAAD residency, Hao Jingban reflects on the racial discrimination she experienced as a Chinese as the pandemic hit the city in I understand (2020). With the virus in full force, many social political factors were triggered. Class and racial differences became immensely apparent. Amid the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protest movement erupted. As the crisis tore many apart, she became aware of the significance of understanding another’s reality, and how most of us all too readily believe we understand another’s pain. As Hao attends the BLM protests, she realises that the movement also served as an emotional pillar for the discriminatory angst she felt during the past months. Quoting singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, she reconsiders her agenda as an artist living in this critical moment. Perhaps, the artist’s first paradoxical epiphany is that to understand, is to accept the utter impossibility of understanding.

As a former resident in Hong Kong, Su Wei traverses across different geographical circles in The Light of Friendship (2020), navigating Hong Kong and its political situation through the observation of individuals, their facial expressions and their beliefs. Interwoven into the video are clips of a local street singer performing for the neighbourhood citizens of Mong Kok. Between her songs, she blesses the enthusiastic crowd with encouraging messages – that there should be “no strife, no quarrels and no struggle”, emphasising harmonious friendships, while efficiently taking cash tips from gawking fans in the crowd. The streetwise performer ends her show with a cover of “The Light of Friendship” by Hong Kong singer Maria Cordero (Fat Mama), a classic canto-song from the Hong Kong film Prison on Fire (1987).  Despite the resonating crowd, these messages mask underlying issues against the complex backdrop of Hong Kong’s 2019 protests. A collective sentiment appears overly simplistic, undermining our differing circumstances. Drowned within voices of those merely fighting for an envisioned ideology, are true victims of systemic oppression, turning to the movement as their last hope.