Hangover Haunted & their Lost Future
2022.08.09 – 2022.09.25
Opening Reception: 2022.8.12, Friday, 6:00pm
Venue: Lumenvisum | L2-02, JCCAC, 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00am-1:00pm, 2:00pm-6:00pm.
*Closed on Mondays (except Public Holiday)
Artist Talk 1: Gaze of 97, HK Calling and the Diasporic Creativities
2022.8.14, Saturday, 2:30pm
L4-03A, JCCAC, 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon
Guest speakers: Lau Pok Chi, David Clarke, Vincent Yu
Host: Lee Wing Ki
Artist Talk 2: The Cursed Generation and their (Im)possible Futures?
2022.9.17, Saturday, 2:30pm
L4-03A, Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon
Guest speakers: Toby Wong Chung Wai, Lam Oi Yee, Kitty Yeung Sik Yung, Linus Kwok Ho Man, Simon Ng Yau Ching
Host: Paul Yeung Tak Ming
*This event is exclusive to members of Lumenvisum.
Registration
Opening Reception & Artist Talk: https://www.eventbrite.hk/e/397021400697
Visiting: https://www.eventbrite.hk/e/397004570357
About the Artists and the Curator
http://www.lumenvisum.org/site2022/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Hangover-Haunted-their-Lost-Futures_Curator-Artist.pdf
Curatorial becoming
Lo Yin Shan
“Haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated,” Jacques Derrida wrote in 1993, in response to the End of History, “the witnesses of history fear and hope for a return.” Or, fear of the destined eternal return, as he believes that ghosts never die and that they are a part of the future. The Algerian Jewish philosopher coined hauntology in Spectres de Marx: “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept.”
After decades of drifting, Marx’s spectres eventually arrive at the other end of history – hovering over Victoria Harbour, as the senior officials celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hong Kong Handover. History is looping spirally, upwards or downwards, with extreme velocity.
The British ghosts of Mark Fisher are coming back too, in spatiality and temporality, to take vengeance for the cancellation of the future. The Goldsmiths’ teacher reactivates Derrida’s hauntology into two trajectories: the no longer and the not yet. The no longer remains effective as a virtuality (a destined pattern); for the yet to happen/born but already dead – the unfulfilled promise of lost futures, this unnameable thing haunts the present and arrives early in the form of revenants.
For Hangover Haunted & their Lost Futures, photographic imagery intervenes to trigger a ‘spectral (re)turn’ of apparition. Adopted hauntology is localized as the triangular portal or app interface. The exhibition is conceptualized into three channelling.
1997 Handover, as the entry point. The Crown, as the punctum. Of the three points of view: Foreign Gaze – ‘a local workman carries part of the cutting tri-service crest’ by PA Royal photographer John Stillwell, is the official witness of decolonization. In-betweenness, diaspora for past and future generations. Documenting global migration and displacement for decades, Lau Pok Chi’s “1997 Street Portraits” series stages a sense of extraordinary time ‘out of joint’. The subjectivity of Hongkonger – as cultural identities have been forged through mass media, local photojournalists ultimately become the anonymous collective.
Through the subjective selection of editors-in-chief, the frontpage imagery by the photojournalists eventually become the collective memories of our times. However, since the narrative of our collective history has been erased, one could only try to rescue the subconsciousness underneath – the private memories of photojournalists, the bare records of their affection dedicated to the city.
1982< >2046, the liminal transit. Non-place. Non-time. Flash back. Fast-forward. The unnameable, the monster of history or the homeless ghosts are wandering around.
Two video works from 2017: Fall Down by Yim Sui Fong, a performative act triggered by the metaphorical fall of Margaret Thatcher. In the oral history project Memories of 31 June 1997, Professor David Clarke was testing a conspired imagination of wishful thinking. So So Happy, the posthumous work of Simon Ng Yau Ching, rediscovered by critic Ballkafka, would be the gem of hauntology in Hong Kong style, reincarnated through cryptic vision, in the name of maniac Red. Toby Wong ( ? ≤ 2046 ), attempts to capture the subconsciousness of anonymous collective as a tribute to the lost spectres of the future.
2047, only with persistence of the ghosts. Born in 1997, three young artists from the “cursed generation” – Lam Oi Yee, Kitty Yeung Sik Yung and Linus Kwok Ho Man, have zero memory of the colonial Hong Kong, but bear the shell of ghosts fast-forwarding to the deadline of our little city. The year of 2047 which has made its early arrival due to the rapid “cancellation of the future”. When the three people who know their Kismet look back in their fifties, what would be their (im)possible imagination of Hong Kong, on the other shore of history?
“The ghostly would displace itself like the movement of this history,” Derrida has been haunted by Marx who was once “a chav” and was named Karl then. He has exiled himself since he was 27 years old and has become stateless ever since until his burial in England. The ghostly Mark Fisher persists and reminds us of hauntology that, “it is about refusing to give up on the ghost or, the refusal of the ghost to give up on us.”