Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Jamsen Law takes a long time to reply to e-mails. In my last e-mail correspondence with the video artist, I asked him briefly if he had any work that I could submit to a new media art award on his behalf. He took one month to respond; however, his reply was long and reflective. It was 2004, the year he left Hong Kong for the rural small town of Ogaki, Japan, to pursue a graduate degree in media art at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS). He wrote, “as u may understand, in this mid-career period, self-evaluation is kind of the main thing of what i am doing. Frankly, i don’t mind to give up media art or even art in general after these two years in iamas. At least, i understand why i choose so” [sic].

Five years have passed since that e-mail, and Law has not given up on art after all. He has also continued to pursue “self-evaluation” within his art practice, mainly through videos, writing, and experimental performance theater. Reflection has always been an underlying theme in Law’s work, even before his 2004 e-mail “confession” to me. 

Law, born in Hong Kong in 1973, became involved in performance and video art during his graduate studies at Hong Kong University in the early 1990s through activities organized by local multidisciplinary arts groups 20 Beans + A Box, Zuni Icosahedron, and Videotage. These organizations not only promoted experimental art forms, but also advocated socially engaged art practices, much like art groups that flourished in Europe and North America in the 1980s, such as London’s Black Audio Film Collective and New York’s Paper Tiger Television. These alternative practices, often politically engaged, sought to bring a voice to pressing issues often left out of mainstream discourse—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues, women’s rights, and freedom of expression.

Law was a young gay man in a highly conservative society at a moment of transition. His first videos were made in the mid-1990s, a period of heightened anxiety for Hong Kong’s citizens in the run-up to the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong to China. However, the 1990s was also a historically important decade for the LGBT community in Hong Kong; homosexuality was decriminalized in 1991.

Although art based on identity politics was already passé in the 1990s in places like New York—where the genre had peaked in the 1980s with artists such as Adrian Piper and Gregg Bordowitz examining race, class, and gender in their work—this self-reflective practice remained unchartered territory for Hong Kong’s artists. Law’s first videos, Every Time We Say Goodbye, Bathroom Fantasy (1997), I went up there and I saw someone bathing (1998), I think therefore I am confused (1998), and Re-presenting Queer Propaganda and Works (1998) were basic explorations of the medium—playing with light, color, and sound, and touching upon issues relevant to the artist, what he described as a “representation of indescribable desire.” Although hardly a mid-career artist at age twenty-seven, his four-chapter video series Matching Four with Twelve, completed over a five-year period (2000-2005), coincided with his graduate studies in media art at IAMAS. At the time, he wrote to me, “Frankly, i don’t mind to give up media art or even art in general after these two years in iamas.” One critic described this highly abstract series, comprised of image manipulations with no real narrative structure, as filled with “long boring shots.” But like a diary, haiku poem, or even Twitter entry, Matching was perhaps never intended for mass consumption. In fact, diaries tend to be intensely boring for anyone aside from the diarist or those intimately involved in the life of the writer. 

The first chapter, Digesting Patience (2000), reveals a color-saturated, pixilated image of a young Chinese man staring directly into the camera while chewing on his food in different domestic settings. At first glance, the work appears like early video experiments of image processing from the 1960s: random images of cityscapes and scantly clad muscular men slowly fade in and out of the background. By the end of this eight-minute clip, we are again alone with the young man, as he reclines on a sofa with his legs spread apart and, yes, continues eating. However, while the work appears to be depicting the simple act of ingesting food, the viewer is left uncomfortably engaged in the double act of voyeurism, wherein the young man is watching you watching him, much like brief cybersex encounters by Webcam. The city swells, the erotica proliferates daily on the Web, and so do one’s sexual urges.

Mapping Vapour (2002), the second chapter in the series, begins with scenes from a generic subway platform in Tokyo broken into a grid-like puzzle. Some boxes reveal images of isolation—people walking backwards or a train moving in reverse, a young man talking on his mobile phone, a view of the sea, cars night cruising. Slowly the image shifts to reveal a major Tokyo intersection with people crossing the street, and then a video clip of two young men falling into an embrace, which is looped, or repeated. One grid box of these two men multiples into two, then two into four, and soon the entire screen is filled with the two men in a pixilated-like composite image, once again, of a highly sexualized muscular male model in various suggestive poses. The final image is of the man, whose head arches back, eluding climax. This abruptly brings us back to reality: a black-and-white image of a young Chinese man asleep on the floor of a dirty apartment. Later, the young man patiently sweeps away the dust. The music evokes a journey through a long tunnel, an uncomfortable composition that might accompany one’s dreams. The video ends with a car traveling in the city at night, and then switches to a bright day on a single-lane highway in the desert.

The third chapter, Orchestrating Apollo (2005), returns to images of cityscapes. However, through the entire video, the lyrics of the Ying Wa College boys’ secondary school hymn, Home of Our Youth, by Rupert Baldwin, creeps along the bottom of the screen like a Karaoke video. Law captures the city of Hong Kong over time, from dawn to dusk, from the harbor at the sea level then high above from the Victoria Peak. Over the urban footage, a simple digital animation of a single-line drawing of a young boy is imposed. The nine-minute video is accompanied by calliope organ music, something that might accompany an amusement park merry-go-round. Slowly the image of the city fades into overlapping images of a burning flame, the rooftops of a Japanese suburb, and a scene of walking through a village. Then the screen separates into two rectangles in which two young men in identical football tracksuits are pictured leaning against a wall. One boy slowly licks a popsicle, while the other simply looks equally bored. The background turns into a speeding train and then digital animation of the boy returns, this time flipped upside down. The train and the boy then morph into a red pulsating cell-like form, accompanied by gyrating electronic music. 

The viewer yearns to make sense of the images fading in and out—by squinting hard enough, images of men having sex appear. A new box appears in the center of the screen, containing a sleeping young man covering his torso with his arms; this image spins around in a crescendo of the carnivalesque music. The work concludes abruptly with the music becoming soft and ambient with a night shot of Hong Kong with its cityscape and blinking neon lights, while the boys in the video exchange places and are released from their confining boxes. The final work in this four-part series, Swearing Coming (2005), begins with a black-and-white image of a young man looking tired and defeated in a room in disarray. The image then shifts to a view from a train window with the countryside rushing before our eyes. The viewer is then presented with contemplative view of the sea with an expansive blue sky and rolling hills in the distant background. Nothing happens for several minutes save the sound of splashing waves. Then from the left side of the frame, a small boat breaks into this monotonous shot, and we return to the young man who turns away from the wreckage of the room. After taking us to an aerial view of a public swimming pool in Hong Kong at dusk, Law returns to one of his favorite shots, a night view from a moving car. Soon, the three scenes—the lake, the aerial view of the pool, and the view from the car—are combined.

Watching the entire forty-minute Matching Four with Twelve, it’s easy to get hooked on Law’s diary-style video work. On the surface, the series can be viewed as a travelogue of Law’s life in Hong Kong and Japan. But the work immerses the viewer in the mundane details of Law’s life—walking through snowy villages, documentation from the Bullet Train, driving through the city—which like psychotherapy delves into what he calls an “exploration towards emotions and nonverbal expression, like running and escaping.”

Law’s early works, such as Bathroom Fantasy, an exploration of the artist’s “indescribable desire,” and his self-described diary video I think therefore I am confused (1997-98), feel unresolved. Matching Four with Twelve, however, while continuing to address desire, goes further into self-evaluation. As Law wrote at the time, “art is ‘still’ about the human’s heart” [sic]. The four chapters of Matching Four with Twelve track the emotional exploration of a gay man in a highly conservative society.

Reflecting on the time when he made the Matching series, Law explained, “After realizing how I used Japan as a methodology to make artwork (or simply understand life) during my stay in IAMAS, I became more conscious of using my daily life as a methodology.” Although the work was not precisely about his personal experiences, he explained that he was “picking up and blowing up some characteristics of four gay friends/actors of mine to express my feeling (desire, fear, and anger) towards gay issues.” 

After completing his master’s at IAMAS in 2006, Law returned to Hong Kong and began teaching at the Hong Kong Art School. The same year, he made the two videos, History as a Mirror and Field of Consciousness, but has not made new work since. He attributes this to a new interest in East Asian culture and the need for time to do research. “It’s time for me to learn more of what’s near me.”

Asked whether his practice has changed since Matching Four with Twelve, Law replied, “I want to make something like a video essay, combining abstract elements, interviews, dramas, animation. Something closer to my daily experience, not just abstracted from my daily experience.” 

Regarding your creations, you have once said that you like to show the strange aspect of people’s lives. Currently, what strange elements of reality are you interested in?

When I use the word “strange” to describe my work, I usually mean “strange moments” or, at times, strange human experiences. That goes hand in hand with my interest in consciousness. These “strange moments” are like gaps that enable us to fly away to anothertime and space, to experience something that may have happened (memory/remembrance) or will happen (in the future/expectation/desire). All of that relates to our consciousness. I am not certain whether this understanding is very different from that of Western psychology. To me, all of that is mixed up, and is useful in order to explain that whichexists around us. Gathering and editing/pasting images is like holding on to a glimpse of thoughts among the millions or billions that we have over the course of one day, andthen presenting and sharing them with people that can be touched by the emotions that the images bear. 

Industrialized food, technology, and impersonal places are obsessive presences in your work. Why is that?

For an urban person such as myself, coming from a city like Hong Kong, finding innerpeace is a lifelong task. The structure of the cities and the goods that surround us confine the limits of the quantity and quality of “tools” that may enable us to liberate ourselves from everyday life. In the end, they place us on a path that is far removed from that of abandoning something, and lead us to return to that from which we wish to free ourselves. This contrast is one of the issues that I am interested in exploring. Perhaps it even describes my type of surrealism, a way of detaching myself from what is common. 

You are one of the leading names among artists working with video and performance inHong Kong. How have these media changed over the course of the last decade?

If I am one of the leading names, I guess that it is because I am one of a few who continue to create in this field. Maybe like everywhere else in the world, the interactive arts have become the most popular; at the other end of the spectrum are literature and the dramatic arts. When television sets and LED panels started being installed in any corner of Hong Kong, the image-saturated city became the city saturated by moving images. Reaching beyond moving graphisms, it seems to me that many people have already noticed that there is something called video painting and image flow. It is just a lot of waste of images, I think. By definition, they all belong in the same category, unfortunately (if we do not take aesthetic quality into account).

You were the director of Videotage, a Hong Kong-based organization turned to the development of video and new media work. You have also directed the Microwave Festival. Why have you abandoned those activities?

I believe that they have helped me a lot, and now I think it is time to start something different. As I said before, I live in a real media-heavy city. In these surroundings, I would like to find more interesting ways of letting art find its way to technologies, and of having the younger people understand what is really going on around them, in a context in which everything needs to be marketed and packed.

In addition to being an artist, you are also a teacher. What are your main concerns when creating and when teaching someone? Do these activities converge at some point?

I teach two different types of students, even though they all may be called art students. Some of them are fine arts students and others are electronic art students. They have very different quality standards, based on the very different values that they have about art and technology. It is not easy to make them all comfortable in order to experiment with the elements that I want them to try. Experimenting is very important, be it involving the eyes and ears only, or including all of the senses. This is the means for connecting artistic elements with what we already have inside ourselves. When we feel touched (emotionally) or attuned (conceptually), we connect ourselves with the artwork. We are all aware of the fact that anything can be turned into an artwork, or that any method may yield an artistic process. I want my students to be able to recreate the type of process/experience that they want to offer to their audiences. Thus, they must understand what they are doing. The same way as I have audiences experience my glimpse of thoughts. 

China is currently the world’s third-largest economy. Is this in any way influencingthe way of making, showing, and reflecting about art in Hong Kong?

I think that being asked questions such as that one is one of the things that artists from Hong Kong are going through. Not that it is a negative or positive thing. The people in Hong Kong need to know this greater China somehow, even though this is not a part of the education that my generation received. Ever since my secondary school years, themes pertaining to the year of 1997 [when Hong Kong went back to being controlled by China] have made the newspaper headlines. Now the question is how to prevent Hong Kong from being marginalized. China is quite strong, in both the good and bad senses, and it influences Hong Kong—a “global city in Asia,” as the local government proclaims—in every aspect.

What projects are you working on right now?

I have been interested in researching and elaborating work focusing on the culture of East Asia ever since the time when I did research in Japan. The violent cultural changesbrought about by modernization or Westernization (I am not referring to wars, but rather to the reasons that allowed wars to happen) led people in East Asia to view their owncultures in a very interesting way. I would like to use the flower as the object that reflects the changes that took place over the course of these years. I do not have a specific date in which to present this work, I am gathering images and researching. Perhaps it will be more along the lines of an essay.

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.” 

Experiments
The 20 Beans + A Box group, of which the Chinese artist is a member, is devoted to creating performances and experimental work in the visual arts field. Established in 1993, the group is comprised of art professionals, but also of philosophers and engineers. 

Master’s 
In 2006, Law concluded a master’s course at IAMAS, an acronym that represents both the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, in Japan. The two institutions, located in Ogaki, are geared towards artist specialization and formation of young creators. 

Classroom
Linked to the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong Art School was founded in 2000 and is managed by artists. The school, with which Law is a teacher, focuses on teaching in three fields: the fine arts, applied art, and electronic art. 

New media
Jamsen Law was one of the directors of the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, which takes place in Hong Kong and is dedicated to the combination of technology and art. Held since 1996, the event promotes exchange between artists and the presentation of works employing new media.