Ellen Pau: What about Home Affairs? – A Retrospective 當家當當家：鮑藹倫回顧展

This essay is part of the exhibition Ellen Pau: What About Home Affairs? — A Retrospective at Para Site

One of Hong Kong’s most influential and pioneering artists, the exhibition features Pau’s multi-faceted artistic practice stemming from the late-1980s to the present, including a selection of video works, archives, and a series of unpublished photographs. Three major video installations —two series of Bik Lai Chu, and Recycling Cinema––are presented in their original formats to illustrate the artist’s unique approach to the medium, within the technological limits of their time of production.

In this exhibition, eighteen of Pau’s most representative works are displayed from a media archaeology perspective – through the development of technology, rather than following the traditional chronological order. The exhibition hopes to examine and interpret Pau’s life and politics through the evolution of technological media. Its title begins with the concept of “home.” There is a statement in the Book of Rites by Confucius chapter entitled “Great Learning” that reads: “Cultivate oneself, put the family in order, govern the state, and pacify the world.” To pacify the world, one needs to go through different stages, with the cultivation of one’s personal life as the most basic practice. The Chinese title is a wordplay between donggaa (house master) and gaadong (family possession), covering themes such as household chores, the status of housewives, and the identity of masters of the house.. The corresponding English title —What about Home Affairs?—alludes to the Hong Kong government’s Home Affairs Bureau, thus opening up a discussion about the relationship between civil political affairs and personal well-being.

Ellen Pau was born to a family of medical doctors. Growing up, she was immersed in an intellectual environment enriched by her father’s expansive scientific knowledge. When she was nine years old, Pau received a Kodak 135 film camera from her father and became interested in photographic techniques and the world of imagery. Pau worked as a radiographer at Queen Mary Hospital after she earned a diagnostic radiology degree from Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 1982. Through to today, Pau’s unique professional background and work experience continues to shape her use of visual language in a way that is intimately connected with the inherent technology and subjectivity of digital media.

The exhibition begins with Pau’s Disenchantment of the Statue (1987) and her recent work I Don’t Have Time to Deal with Fear (2018). Disenchantment of the Statue criticizes the hegemonic status of television and evaluates its political function in domesticating subjects under the logic of capitalism. Arrows constantly appear on the screen, pointing to London street names on Hong Kong’s defensive wall as if to ask: Where is Hong Kong heading? Pau’s new augmented reality (“AR”) work I Don’t Have Time to Deal with Fear was triggered by the early 2018 discovery of a wartime bomb at a railway construction site in Wan Chai. Through AR technology, Pau recreates Hong Kong’s urban legends along the Gin Drinker’s Line, seeking to re-evaluate one’s relationship with the city. Coincidently, both works took inspiration from this Gin Drinker’s Line (a fortified defensive line used in 1941 during the Battle of Hong Kong in the Second World War) to interrogate the role that technology––wrapped in wallpaper reflecting incarnations of the ghosts of war––plays in mediating or whitewashing historical violence.

These remnants of historical violence are also visible in Pau’s efforts to connect her evaluation of gender issues with Hong Kong’s civil politics, transforming the female body into a battlefield for subjective awareness, while exploring and debating the truthfulness of machine-produced images. The exhibition reproduces two pieces from Pau’s Bik Lai Chu series, a group of video installations developed over the course of ten years. Bik Lai Chu refers to the household cleaning product Pledge—its English name ‘pledges’ to keep a promise—is a metaphor for the Chinese government’s promise to follow through on its political commitment to Hong Kong for fifty years after the handover. In this work, one can see the silhouette of a female who looks up every few seconds, accompanied each time by the sound of a pile driver. Through this persistent pounding noise, the artist questions how social norms and stereotypical gender roles sculpt, regulate, and restrain the female body. The image of “her” is absent in She Moves (1988). Instead, water droplets move to the tune of the popular World War II song “We’ll Meet Again”, abstracting the battlefield and experimenting with the fluid deployments formed by different image textures and technological forms. Song of the Goddess (1991) explores the love story of two Cantonese Opera divas, investigating how a patriarchal society silences women’s individual voices and further deprives them of a shared identity in mainstream culture. Exploration of the blurry line between truth and fiction, as well as changing image textures, became the artist’s primary visual language in the late 1980s through the 1990s. This subsequently influenced her future mixed-sensory attempts to bridge behavioral performance and electronic noise.

In the late 1980s, Pau began to collaborate with Zuni Icosahedron as well as with various choreographers, while filming many commercial music videos. She combined the media screen, the dance stage, behavioral performances, and installations to develop a video dance language fusing popular culture and contemporary imagery. In 1989, Drained II explored the video performance form through stage performance. Filmed with a household video camera, Drained II attempts to explore the metaphysical beings both on stage and electronic medium. Through a constant loop and image segmentation, the work also reflects the physical anxiety of inhabitants living in a dense urban center. In 1997, Pau and choreographer Dick Wong created Movement #1/10, weaving Wong’s body movements with jazz and merging images, music, and light together through rhythm. The imagery, through the editing process, becomes the medium’s rhythm and its art form. The exhibition explores yet another of Pau’s important creative approaches: the deconstruction, and reconstruction, of static and fluid images. In 2016, Pau created Emergence (A work in progress) for the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Inspired by a citizen scientist’s genome study of the Bauhinia blakeana––the floral emblem of Hong Kong—this project attempts to use data generated during the genetic sorting process to translate the DNA profiles of plants and animals into sound. During the deconstruction of DNA profiles, materials are converted, recomposed, and then reconstructed into another existence that shares the same biological essence but has a completely different physical form, aiming to reinterpret the DNA of Bauhinia blakeana. The series of photos on the Bauhinia blakeana are on public display for the first time. These images were taken casually, capturing scenes such as a car accident and underwear hanging from the windows of the Kwun Lung Lau public housing estate in Sai Wan. Through the use of special effects, the photos are transformed into a temple flying a flag; the image data is converted into a soundtrack. Pau titled this work A work in progress in hopes of recovering the Bauhinia blakeana’s full DNA one day, completing her interpretation of this symbolic “flag.”

The political nature of Ellen Pau’s work is not reflective of a nostalgic reminiscence of a past era nor a direct criticism of certain ideas, but instead it is revealed through her very personal, autobiographical video diaries, which have evolved into a work embodying a collective memory. Through the composition and production of images, Pau explores and reflects on ways of creating a visual experience that transcends the camera lens and sublimates the ordinary into symbols of life and emotion. In TV Game of the Year (1989), Blue (1989-1990), Diversion (1989), Expiration (1997-2000), and Fanfare for the Common People (2010), Pau records the uneasy struggle in Hong Kong’s political context during transitional periods. In 2003, the artist created the video text For Some Reasons based on the event of regulating the Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, recounting things people could not or should not do through the replacement of Chinese characters.

A video becomes art in the hands of an artist—it creates illusion rather than merely reproducing reality. It realizes its value by detaching the artist’s inner world from external reality through the camera’s mechanical form, making the invisible visible, and setting forth new mechanisms and negotiations of space to challenge the closed traditional system. For Pau, the space she constantly negotiates is her home, Hong Kong. The rhythm of Hong Kong life and its historical and political events are all encoded in her visual works, with the masterpiece being Recycling Cinema, which represented Hong Kong in the 49th Venice Biennale.

Recycling Cinema represents the pinnacle of Pau’s works that integrate motion-picture techniques and electronic noises. It is also her response to the evolving meaning of “home.” This exhibition presents once more the uncut original film, allowing us to feel the artist’s static gaze upon the changing cityscape, and compelling us to move beyond our simple spatial experience. Recycling Cinema records vehicles on a Hong Kong expressway over the course of 24 hours. The exhibition restores the original filming technique by using an expanded projection to cast the recordings on a curved screen of 150 degrees which breaks the boundaries of the images and creates a panoramic and immersive viewing experience. The speed and direction of the moving images are uncoordinated; the rhythm changes in response to a viewer’s breath or physical movement. Upon leaving the screen, an image travels across the room and returns to its point of departure, creating a sense of temporal and spatial imbalance. By using long-take surveillance, panning the camera, and filming close-ups, the artist fills Recycling Cinema with different rhythms throughout its short runtime. Pau observes the cityscape from a passive perspective while closing in on the highway’s moving cars to create multiple points of view. Meanwhile, the film is interspersed with night scenes observed from Victoria Peak, with overlapping images of high-rises and the harbor, shot with a fast shutter-speed lens. The film eventually returns to the monotonous highway using a different lens perspective to highlight the change between the scenes. There is no dialogue throughout the film; only waves crashing, cars racing, and two lyrical lines from John Lennon’s Love (1970) emerging at the end: “Love is truth, truth love.” Recycling Cinema is a love letter, the curved space is the road home; if you walk along the on-screen arc, you should be able to find your way home. The scenery along the way reveals Pau’s criticisms of her urban experience; it is also a filial letter she penned to Hong Kong.

鮑藹倫為香港最具影響力及前瞻性的藝術家之一，此次展覽展出近三十年來錄像作品的選件、檔案文獻、未曾發表過的系列攝影作品以及最新力作。展覽同時重製了三件具代表性的錄像裝置—兩件《碧麗珠》系列以及《循環影院》，還原最初始的展出形式，以呈現在當時的時空背景下，藝術家對媒材展現的獨特手法。此次展覽挑選十八件具代表性的作品，以媒體考古學的角度取代傳統編年的展示，試圖透過科技媒材的演進來爬梳閱讀鮑藹倫生命政治的一種方式。

展覽題目以「家」的概念出發，《禮記：大學篇》言：「修身、齊家、治國、平天下」，欲達大同世界，中間是有程序的，而最基本的需從修正心念、居家生活做起。中文題目玩弄「當家」及「家當」的排列組合，意味從家庭雜務、家務事、家務婦的身份，到誰是當家者，誰來作主，對應英文題目借香港民政事務局 (Home Affairs Bureau) 之名來思考民間政治事務與個人事務間的關係。

展覽以1987年的《裂像》與2018年的新作《到此為咫》作為序曲，《裂像》批判電視的霸權地位，並反思在資本邏輯運作下，馴化主體的政治功能。 AR新作《到此為咫》則以2018年年初灣仔炸彈事件為靈感，透過擴增實境的技術再現醉酒灣防線上的香港城市神話，嘗試藉由神話來重新理解我們與城市間的關係。兩件作品因緣際會地以1941年二次大戰香港保衛戰的醉酒灣防線為切入點，進一步思考科技是否得以扮演洗清歷史暴力的角色。

而這種對歷史暴力的遺留也可見於鮑藹倫透過自身對性別議題的觀照與香港民生政治連結，將女性身軀化成爭取主體意識的戰場，繼而探索機器生產下影像間的真假並提出辯證。此次展覽重新製作了兩件藝術家長達十年發展的錄像裝置《碧麗珠》 系列。「碧麗珠」為居家清潔用品，英文名「Pledge」同時由保證、承諾之意，暗喻中國政府對香港五十年不變的政治承諾。作品中可見一個女性的背影每幾秒抬頭一次，每次抬頭會發出如打樁般的聲響，透過此反覆衝擊的行為，藉以質問社會規範及典型社會性別角色是如何形塑、規範、約束女性的身體。

八十年代末起鮑藹倫開始與進念二十面體及多位編舞家合作，同時也拍攝許多商業音樂錄影帶，她將媒體的屏幕、舞台、行為表演與裝置結合在一起，發展了一套融合流行文化與當代視覺的錄像舞蹈語言。1989年的《借頭問路II》透過舞台表演來探索錄像表現的形式，以家用常見的錄像器材為拍攝工具，試就舞台與科技的形而上存在提出討論，並藉由一成不變的循環、影像分割反應城市密集的地理空間所帶來人心躁鬧下的居住情商指數，影像在此透過剪輯過程成為一種媒介的節奏和藝術格式。

鮑藹倫作品中的政治性不在大張旗鼓進行時代的懷舊或批判性思想論述，她透過具個人自傳色彩的錄像日記發展成共同集體的回憶，探索及反省的是如何藉由影像的組成和產生過程，創造鏡頭以外的觀看經驗，把尋常點昇華成生命與情感的象徵。《估領袖》(1989)、《藍》（1989）、《兩岸唔到頭》(1989)、《錄像肚臍》(1990)、《呼氣》(1997-2000) 及《阿運會》(2010) 等是她對香港在過渡政治時期的不安掙扎下的表述；香港生活的節奏、歷史政治事件的轉折都隱藏在她作品影像構成的密碼中，而集大成之作便是她代表香港館參加第四十九屆威尼斯雙年展的《循環影院》。

《循環影院》是鮑藹倫對動態影像的技術構成與電子雜訊演繹的代表作，也是她對「家」的新舊意義的回應。此次展覽特別重現了當時無剪輯版本的裝置原型，得以一窺藝術家刻意以靜態的角度來觀察城市中的變動，在捕捉的瞬間促使觀眾思考超越單一的空間經驗。《循環影院》記錄了二十四小時香港高速公路上來往車子的移動，展覽現場的裝置複製再現了當時拍攝的手法，以投影機替代錄像機，影像投影在150度的弧形屏幕上，打破影像的框框，製造一個迂迴循環的觀賞經驗。影像移動速度及方向沒有刻意同步，反而隨著每一位入場觀者的呼吸、動作產生不同的節奏，畫面在離開屏幕後利用現場空間回到原位，影像的流動轉移在此時產生了一種時空上的失衡。整部影片沒有對話，只有海浪衝擊的聲音、汽車的呼嘯，以及最後結尾出現約翰藍儂1970年《Love》的兩句歌詞：「愛是真的，真的是愛」。《循環影院》是一封情書，弧形空間是回家的路，如果沿著螢幕上的弧線走，應該會走到回家的路，一路上的風景是鮑藹倫對城市經驗的批判，也是她給香港的一封家書。

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