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.”