The world is on the verge of a transition of generations. It has been 10 years since Time’s Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation feature was published. While most Millennials are already in their 30s, people born in the mid-90s are welcoming their early adulthood. Young, passionate, and in trend. They are the future.

Society simplifies Gen Zers as a younger version of Millennials, who are often labelled as over-self-conscious and self-centred. Simplification always leads to misunderstanding. Gen Z is, just the same as any of their precessors, unique in response to the world they grew up in. Scholars categorise Gen Z with some traits: Internet native, caring about diversity and justice, impacted by the environmental crisis and Covid-19, conscious of privacy, and still finding their own identity amidst the very loud social media era.

Putting generic speculations aside, the next generation of artists interpret the world around them, articulate their feelings, and define themselves with art.

This programme consists of four video works from artists in their 20s. They question being an individual in the globalised digital era (Yinglin Zhou, Unknown Connection Line, 2021), search for self-identity in the collage of memory fragments (Tsz Kwan Ngai, A Trip to There, 2021), reconstruct a dreamy recollection of fragmented image of their city (Cyrus Leung, Lok-Yi Ty & Angel Kwan, Mirage, 2022), and attempt to understand the frustration in relation to self and their hometown (Nicole Ip, Crevasse, 2023).

Programme

Yinglin Zhou, Unknown Connection Line (2020, 20’).
Tsz-Kwan Ngai, A Trip to There (2021, 20’).
Cyrus Leung, Lok-Yi Ty & Angel Kwan, Mirage (2022, 3’).
Nicole Ip, Crevasse (2023, 22’).

Supported by:

Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

Hong Kong Arts Development Council
Videotage is financially supported by Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Hong Kong Arts Development Council supports freedom of artistic expression. The views and opinions expressed in this project do not represent the stand of the Council.

Videotage is a leading Hong Kong-based non-profit organization specializing in the promotion, presentation, creation and preservation of new media art across all languages, shapes and forms. Founded in 1986, Videotage has evolved from an artist-run collective to an influential network, supporting creative use of media art to explore, investigate and connect with issues that are of significant social, cultural and historical value. A recurring collaborator of Casa Asia, this year Videotage presents a selection of “performative videos” by different practitioners that are representative of their broad knowledge of time based art.

Islands in between…the seas will sing and the wind will carry us… is an installation proposal by filmmaker and visual artist Sherman Ong (Malesia, 1971) that attempts to represent the Nusantara (literally, the Indonesian/Malay name of Maritime Southeast Asia) through the recollection of accounts around past and modern stories of migration that have shaped the diasporic nature of the region. Central in the work is an anthology of nine short films in the forms of monologues or conversations around of interregional histories, geography and social mores. Overall, Ong’s practice focuses on the socio-cultural anatomy of diasporic communities, of trans-border and trans-cultural identities, while it simultaneously interrogates myth and memory. 

This video selection departs from the artists’ anxieties towards the art world and it lingers on our society that twists the essence of an individual through all kinds of mass media (including religion), and the nature pouncing on human beings for their long-term destruction. From concrete perceptible crises to invisible, metaphysical, imaginative crises, these films embody the eccentric aesthetics of imagining the death.

*A programme presented by Casa Asia

With the contribution of:

Images dominate our lifestyle and inevitably affect the way of thinking of the new generations. Among Taiwanese contemporary art expressions, video and experimental film enrich the visual aesthetics and symbolic meanings with their own critical character, originality and diversity. The curatorial project TAIWAN VIDEA aims at converging the creative energies and aesthetic features of video, experimental film, animation etc. while putting forth the diversified creation in Taiwan.

*A programme presented by Casa Asia

With the contribution of:

LOOP and Casa Asia present Ascent (2016), one of Fiona Tan’s latest feature length films and representative of the artist’s exploration of movement and stillness. Through the collection of a wide selection of still images portraying the mountain from different perspectives and a subtle voice-over, the film recounts of the fictional correspondence between a western female writer and her Japanese deceased partner. 4500 diverse photographs from the past 150 years constitute the basis for this work, which unfolds into a poetic exercise spanning both fiction and documentary and opening up questions on hybrid forms of production and the mingling of disciplines. Fiona Tan (Pekanbaru, Indonesia) is best known for her skilfully crafted video and film installations, in which explorations of memory, time, history and the role of visual images are key. Her installations and photographic works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in international venues. She has written and directed to date two feature length films.

* In collaboration with Casa Asia.

GREATER China – Here, There and Everywhere endeavours to explore the divides, boundaries and spaces between different Chinese communities. Through the presentation of artist films from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and beyond, this project aims to investigate fragments of histories, personal experiences and global concerns, alike. By assembling a variety of regional, temporal and artistic perspectives, the screening program will re-interpret the experience of the here and now, while looking into the potentially excluded moving image artworks and making visible fragments of experience that disrupt time, space and continuity.

This project, curated by the director of the Nam June Paik Museum Jin-suk Suh, embraces the works of more than twenty artists who explore Asian identities under the past, present and future of various Asian democracies, and their local adaptations and struggles within the global system. The proposal envisions the wefts and warp threads of such democracies, their various significances and patterns, as well as a new humanist model for the twenty-first century, as a measure to face the general crisis affecting both Eastern and Western countries, and a tool to break the existing lines of control that divide the world.

Download the film programme here.

In its second edition, Both Sides Now—curated by Isaac Leung, director of Videotage—attempts to explore national identity and culture and to raise questions about both China & Hong Kong, by proposing (historical) re-readings of potentially excluded and forgotten artists, moving images and reinterpretation of the experience of the here and now.