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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fZGqnTDmAVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Trailer for final art work of Bloom Room (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fZGqnTDmA) Made by AnaBruceCimon.

https://youtu.be/MTvADkwb7YcVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: exploited-fxxking dead banana (https://youtu.be/MTvADkwb7Yc) Exploited_by AnaBruceCimon

F(increasing volume and speed): Humor, Nonsens, Absurdity, Humbug, Rubbish, Poppycock, Piffle, FlimFlam, FiddleFaddle, Malarkey, Flapdoodle, Bushwa, Tomfoolery, Bosh, Folderol.
during this listing the sergeant dies of an heart attack & so he gets reanimated by the three privates, but the scene goes on without any comment about it
S: I thought your work was gonna be about „Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. Plants. and Personalities and Identities“.
B: Well, that was just some sort of „Topical Island“.

Blanket! Rope!
Somehow these two phrases became the major key words of the performance. We had our meeting under the blanket, and prepared the tryout performance of the rope in park with elementary school children. How a child play with flashlight under the blanket in the middle of the night, telling stories to their siblings or friends? How exactly did we play? Hong Kong was the tireless energy that pushed and embraced us. There were moments when the energy seemed to be overwhelming, suffocating even like a blanket on the face, strangling like a robe on the chest. Still there were also moments of pure naïve, and Hong Kong gave you whole freedom to play. The contradiction of city as a playground or a gigantic concrete jungle are the two contradictions we began to rationalize in the performance, and a crucial dynamic for us to come around.

Come and drift with us through a space of experimentation on 26 September in XXX club. Immerse in a party night with performances. Artists from Hong Kong, Mainland, Taiwan, Japan and Europe in collaborative action with live music, dj’s, performances, visuals, installations and interactions.

Lecturer by Ouyang-Yu
Author, Melbourne and Shanghai

‘Migration for Good, for an Eternal Étranger’, a topic Ouyang Yu will be talking about in which he’ll describe his experience as an Australian citizen living and teaching in China where he was born, how his writings are censored in both China and Australia, for the similar reasons of unmarketability, and how he lives as a poet and novelist writing in two languages in two countries, with English unpublishable in China and Chinese unpublishable in Australia, or only to a very limited degree.

Hangzhou by Ana Beach Day   https://vimeo.com/146738434  

Lecture by Gordon Mathews
Professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Who are we? Today two contradictory discourses shape our cultural identities, those of the state and of the market. The state tells us that we should love our country, while the market tells us that we should love money and choice. Both of these forces are based on lies, but because we are immersed in these discourses, we cannot easily see this. Hong Kong is unusual in the world, in that it has long been based not on the discourse of the state, but only on that of the market.

Workshop by Brandon Farnsworth, Music Curator

Through a mix of presentations and performances, the Connecting Sound Workshop offered a space for artists working in various performing arts fields to come together in a relaxed atmosphere and share practices, ideas, and experiences. It offered a space that promoted unexpected encounters while placing no emphasis on finished products, preferring rather to spill into the eternal flow of practice.

https://vimeo.com/146733919

Dance On Series: ‘ODDs’
Individuals cross each other’s path, a connection takes place.
The question is, however, whether or not we realize its existence.

Lam Chun-ho, Ivanhoe, a multi-discipline choreographer, will partner with Tsoi Wan-wa, Shirley, a multi-talent performer, and other team members – Swiss composer Benjamin Ryser, sound installation artist Fabian Gutscher, veteran stage designer Lee Chi-wai, and video designer Shing Pok-man – to forge an orbit within the soul that allows for introspection.

Lecture by Zhao Chuan
Writer, art critic, curator and theatre director

“The stage is a small world, and the world is a big stage”- how does reality unveil drama every day and make it impossible for us to stay out of social theatre? Grass Stage is a theatre collective founded in spring 2005. Under the direction of Zhao Chuan—writer, curator and theater director, it has put on a number of programs and performances which steadily grew in influence and acclaim. The members of Grass Stage encourage ordinary persons to enter the theater to create a social theater with a rich social conscience.

Isabelle Sprenger: Do you have pets? What kind and how would you describe your relation with it? If not would you like to have pets? What and why?
Eva Lin: Do you like creating art? Why?

Slowly walking. With a lack of body-tension. The people in the MTR are “schlärpälä”, but not with coziness. More with a hecticness, as if 5 seconds of waiting at the entrance would really make a difference. But maybe this is the best way of walking in this city. Not too stressed, and still not being relaxed.

Lecture by Christopher Kriese

What would you do if you knew nobody was watching? What
would you do if you were invisible in the real world? What
would you do if you were invisible in the internet? How could
anonymity transform arts and activism?

Lecturer by Kenneth Ip Shu Kei
Chair School of Film and Television HKAPA

There were two kinds of cinema in Hong Kong in the 1950s, the Cantonese cinema which catered more to the grass-root population, and the Mandarin cinema which found its audience mostly among the middle class. Both cinemas serve as a mirror to the many social problems facing the colony after WWII. The lecture attempts to look at the division of urban space, particularly the housing problem, in that decade via a few outstanding and representative cinematic works.

Li Shang Ciao: What will you do with $100HKD/10 CHF?
Lan Zi Yan: Describe our program in one word.

  The delicate dribble of water on the cheek, The remnant smell of espresso, *PAK* – snapping chopsticks, and the lingering taste of orange citrus. These are the sensations of the ordinary. If life gives us a tabula rasa, sensations are our tools. Sensations are perceivable by all of us, though often neglected. With a certain consciousness, we can bring these sensations to our awareness. To be reminded of the humbling existence of our kind. To feel sensations. To react to these feelings. To feel the feelings. Inspired by the somatosensory experience, we play with the most mundane objects of every life. We activate our senses. We discover new ways to sense and be sensed. We explore the absence and presence of sensations. They come in waves, changing as frequently as our perceptions of them. One by one, we help each other through a somatosensory journey that he or she will remember for a lifetime. Our video serves as an expression of these very experiences. The production enabled us to think about our sensations from a different perspective. By examining methodically …

Lecture by Frank Vigneron
Director of MA program in Fine Art, Chinese University of Hong Kong

After a recapitulation of the notions of ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West’’ in the work of Edward Said and the kind of problems they have generated in the evaluation of art in Hong Kong (illustrated with some examples of two kinds of artwork using concepts and visuals from Euro-America and China), the process of hybridization is then presented as the way in which a culture will transform into something new. The question is therefore to establish what can be called a hybrid.

First we probably talked more about our group than about what we want to do. Because we are the big group, we  always had to work on how we organize our group. We found a possible working format in ‘The ABC of Actions on Human Connection’. The Idea is to realize 26 little actions which focus on what we all have as common ground: The believe in human connection. To work on the 26 actions for the next 6 weeks, we developed following group manual:   GROUP MANUAL  ..(to be tested & refined in Eggtion).. Theme We all believe in human connection; this is what we want to focus on; it is our main theme. Presentation Thursday Goal of the group: to make a presentation about the work in progress before, during (in case it is not disturbing or it’s achieving something artistically), or after the lecture. The presentation is a composition of all works made by during the week. The composition of the presentation is decided in the afternoon by all members.The presentation can be any kind …

Lecture by Lin Hongjohn
Curator and Chairperson of Fine Arts Dep, Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan

In 1703 the high society of London there appeared George Psalmanaazaar who claimed himself a Formosan to be abducted by a Christian missionary. In his book, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704) , described Formosa to be a country of abundant resources, governed by a Japanese ruler. In this fictive book, Formosan people was almost half-naked, only wearing silver plates over their private parts. Horses, camels, and elephants were domesticated for transportation. One of the high peaks of the book was that every year Formosans sacrificed the eldest sons to their gods, and even in the second edition (1705), Formosan were exaggerated as cannibals, who ate those were sacrificed and executed. Being a celebrity of his exotic oriental identity and feted by all the literary and philosophical lions of London, Psalmanaazaar were even invited to teach Formosan in Oxford University. Psalmanaazaar was the beau monde in the celebrities of London.