This video offers an insight into our two days “HOT POT – Spicy Little Art Festival”, which took place on 20 and 21 November 2015 at Connecting Space Hong Kong and AVA Kai Tak Campus. The festival served as the final presentation format of the first pilot of “Transcultural Collaboration” and was open to the public. Get an impression of the art work of 6 transcultural and cross-disciplinary teams and the great atmosphere of both performance venues! Conception & Direction: Bruce Liu (SCM) & Cimonfinix (ZHdK) Filming: DELTA Creation, Hong Kong Video Editing: Bruce Liu Sound: Cimonfinix

The Net[t] at Hong Kong’s Music & Arts Festival Clockenflap
27 – 29 November 2015

A series of practices around the process of disappearing – physically or metaphorically, temporarily and at least partially
Outdoor Video installation by Mayumi Arai & Nina Willimann

Hot Pot – Spicy Little Art Festival Site specific two-room multimedia installation by Liane Mah, Philipp Spillmann, Ma Haijiao, Tobias Fandel Saturday, 21 November, 5pm Kai Tak Campus, Academy of Visual Arts “absense” invites you to experience a very unusual spatial performance situation. How do your physical feeling and your thoughts affect your perception of space, movements, sounds and not least images and words? What can you see, what can you hear and how do you deal with it? Does your cognition leads you to new aesthetical experiences by reflecting the absence? A two-room installation, video documentary, room two, Liane Mah (performance), Ma Haijiao (video), Tobias Fandel (sound) absense/ intense days. Long nights. Composing, cutting, dancing, hammering, painting the walls. Claustrophobia. A feeling very typical for Hong Kong. A psychological reaction to a suffocating situation. A physical reaction to the suffocation of modern live. Modern livestyle. Routine. Spaces and possibilities to move. In our work we started to dig deeper in the topic of noise which brought us step by step to the topic of claustrophobia, which we explored by text, sound, movie and movement. …

Hot Pot – Final Dinner

What happens if 22 artists from Asia and Europe from a wide range of art and design disciplines are collaborating for 14 weeks? HOT POT – Spicy Little Art Festival proudly presents the final works of 6 art collectives, an explosive blend of cultural and artistic ingredients from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Romania. Come and taste two days of hard-boiled, finger lickin’ crisp or tenderly melting performances and installations.

The Net[t] proposes an immersive experiment on our reflections about the topic of human connections.

Performances & Installations by 5 art collectives: “Ab(sence)”, “Tutu & Ida in Hong Kong”, “How to Disappear (Almost Completely)”, “Fucking Dead Banana”, “!?tahw” Afterparty with DJ Yao! Keep it boiling with drinks, food and dance till late!
Saturday, 21 November, Kai Tak Campus, Academy of Visual Arts

HOT POT – Spicy Little Art Festival proudly presents the final works of 6 art collectives, an explosive blend of cultural and artistic ingredients from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Romania. Come and taste two days of hard-boiled, finger lickin’ crisp or tenderly melting performances and installations.

Friday, 20 November, Connecting Space Hong Kong
Performance: “The Net[t]”. DJ-Set by DJ Sniff

HOT POT – Spicy Little Art Festival proudly presents the final works of 6 art collectives, an explosive blend of cultural and artistic ingredients from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Romania. Come and taste two days of hard-boiled, finger lickin’ crisp or tenderly melting performances and installations.

Recital by Swiss flautist Matthias Ziegler

This recital features the world-renowned Swiss flutist Matthias Ziegler and his very unique amplified contrabass flute. A solo recital, in which Ziegler use his amplified contrabass flute to perform a program of musical works which includes contemporary extended techniques and amplified techniques enabling listeners to hear sounds that they never been heard.

Amplifying the flute in a particular way makes it possible to increase the volume of the micro sound structures inside the flute to an audible level. It is like looking at the instrument through a magnifying glass. There is a whole orchestra inside the flute which opens new sound worlds for composers and improvisers.

Haijiao Ma: What do you think about Hong Kong?

I think you’re serious. Fishes in plastic bags don’t move a lot.
Plastic bag top left. Two fishes. Moving fast.
Plastic bag middle right. One fish. Moving slowly.
Plastic bag top right . Three fishes. Not moving.
Plastic bag bottom left. Four fishes. Moving fast.

Throughout the whole semester of the 1st pilot of “Transcultural Collaboration” in autumn 2015 we are having a regular and continuous lecture series framing and defining the program focussing on various aspects of “Transculturality”, which is the core topic of this graduate semester program.

Tutu and Ida, a team of Chinese and German investigators invite the audience to follow their journeys exploring the unexpected in the city of Hong Kong not knowing where everything will end up.

When you go on a journey you have a goal. Most of the time you have a particular place in mind and an idea of what you are going to do there. Most people follow a certain path and even plan their whole trip from the beginning to the end. A map helps you to orientate yourself in unknown places. If you get lost you asked google maps where you are and it leads you to your chosen location. But what happens if you get lost? Maybe you end up somewhere you never would have expected.
What does it feel like to get lost, being a stranger in Hong Kong?

Live Performance by Mayumi Arai & Nina Willimann

1) to ​mix with and ​join ​society or a ​group of ​people, often changing to suit their way of ​life, ​habits, and ​customs.
2) to ​combine two or more things in ​order to ​become more ​effective.

As a martial art, T’ai Chi is externally a soft exercise, but internally hard, even as it seeks softness. If we are externally soft, after a long time we will naturally develop internal hardness. It’s not that we consciously cultivate hardness, for in reality our mind is on softness. What is difficult is to remain internally reserved, to possess hardness without expressing it, always externally meeting the opponent with softness. Meeting hardness with softness causes the opponent’s hardness to be transformed and disappear into nothingness.

Uniform adjective: Remaining the same in all cases and at all times; unchanging in form or character. Denoting a garment forming part of a person’s uniform.
Uniform noun: The distinctive clothing worn by members of the same organization or body or by children attending certain schools

Three people in a room. Painting, composing, filming. Neck-deep.
Trying to make it bloom. Boom

Simon Dietersdorfer: What is the soundtrack of your life?
Ida Sons: How would you preserve the memories, experiences and emotions during the time in Hong Kong?

Dorothy Wong: Did your perception of Asian/European people change since joining the program?
Fabian Gutscher: Read a part of your motivation letter for this program.

Jude Liu: Do you think animals in captivity consider the zoo as their home?
Benjamin Ryser: What would you do differently if you were the leader of your group?

Ana-Maria Negrea: What is one of your weaknesses?
Charan Li: How would you imagine yourself as a 80 years old?

Mayumi Arai: Does the program have an influence on your personal artistic work and thinking? If not now, can you imagine it having an impact on your work in the future?
Philipp Spielmann: What is your favorite restaurant or best food experience in Hong Kong?

Hong Kong is probably the worst place for inter- or multicultural romanticism. Whoever believes that cultures, for instance Western and Far Eastern ones, are necessarily distinct entities will be disappointed here. HK rather suggests that singularity and similarity might as well be the two sides of the same coin. Exoticizing and othering tendencies have a hard time in HK, notwithstanding the persistence of difference. Especially HK island is a genuine transcultural place. The “inter” in interculturality presupposes that there are still at least two distinct cultures and a void between them. The prefix “trans” refers to “beyond” and “through”, hence “transcultural” suggests that we can go beyond given understandings of culture, that we can move through cultures.