Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Prior to formalizing his knowledge in the field of arts, Jamsen Law (Hong Kong, China, 1973) was already experimenting with performance and visual arts. One of the founders of multimedia collective 20 Beans + A Box, established in Hong Kong in 1993, the Chinese artist had his first solo exhibition—an installation he showed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong—two years before earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. 

Before he graduated, in 1997, Law won the MTV Golden Prize for the Getting Used to Run independent video. In the video, the psychological preparation that precedes the act of running, the ecstasy and well-being connected to the exercise, and expectations regarding the other are key themes. 

In 2000, the author earned a master’s degree in literature and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. From then on, he started teaching at the institution, where he remained as a professor for four years, in addition to giving lectures and workshops at other institutes in the city. 

The year 2000 also represents the beginning of a creative cycle that marked the artist’s career: the Matching Four with Twelve series, in which his reflections on consciousness, desire, psychosis, idealizations, and meditation are depicted in different colors, perspectives, and representations. 

“I am not interested in working with what I understand. My objective, by using and making art with digital tools, is to understand how people are able to live in such different ways, so different from what I might imagine and from what I am familiar with,” he says in a statement about his creations. 

Comprised of videos Digesting Patience, Mapping Vapour, Orchestrating Apollo, and Swearing Coming, the series took the artist five years to conclude. It also follows and reflects his thinking as it evolves with new studies and experiences. During that same period, from 2004 to 2006, Law studied at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), in Japan, where he earned a master’s degree in media creation. 

In these works, deconstructed images shattered into geometrical fragments or transformed into autonomous blocs multiply themselves to leave empty the portrait of the being, of the individual. They are also transformed in order to reveal disturbing aspects in a daily routine of well-defined rules, such as the passersby walking backwards in Mapping Vapour (2002). 

Law’s inside scenes are devoid of personal marks, the outside scenes are often set in snow and blizzard, and the houses and bedrooms might as well be boxes. The domestic, like a man sweeping up a house, the routine—the wait for the subway on the platform, everyday life in the rhythm of his characters’ stream of consciousness—, the banality are mediated by manipulated and at times sped-up images. 

The multiple possibilities of expression using electronic devices fascinate and, at the same time, upset the artist. The omnipresence of monitors, LEDs, buttons, and electronic devices in Hong Kong, one of the most fertile raw materials for the author’s propositions, prompt the appearance in his work of reflections on the mental states that the image overdose can bring about. 

In his investigation of the meanings, processes, and products related to consciousness, one of the artist’s main themes, Law created Field of Consciousness (2006), an installation presented in the State of the Art section of the Southern Panoramas competitive exhibition, during the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil (2007). 

The work earned the artist the event’s artistic residency prize, which took him to the WBK Vrije Academie, in The Hague. In this new season of creations, he intends to expand on the studies that he has been carrying out on how East Asian populations are processing their culture in the light of the big changes brought about by Westernization. The flower is the symbolic object that the artist plans on using from now on. “I am gathering images and researching. Perhaps it will be more along the lines of an essay.”