In the past ‒ maybe 200 years ago, an art piece would be something that you can hold in your hand
or you can really say that, „it’s this thing. This thing is the artwork.“ But as we have artwork that is
intangible or time-based even…
Now I can see more and more of an artwork that I cannot describe it as a … it has a beginning or an
end. And it is quite open I think.
This is the work that I made just two days ago. I was inspired by the first picture.
Usually, I would put all the first impressions, the first inspiration in the first picture of the video. So, if
you want to understand my video work you probably just ask me, „why did you use this as the first
picture?“. Then I can almost explain to you the whole ideas. And this is about… This picture, if you
recognize it, it comes from Beijing, the CCTV tower. This picture at the end ‒ it’s just a printed
picture, it’s not a movie and you can see the Pantone colour here and it’s called APEC Blue and you
have the RGB value at-tached to it. So, it’s a very accurate blue that you want to use for APEC, the
conference that was held earlier this month in Beijing with all the important politicians, economics,
persons … The reason why we need ‒ or Beijing needs ‒ to produce this accurate blue is they want
to have a blue sky for Beijing and they all want to ‒ when they have the press image ‒ all the blue
skies match the same blue colour. And so I have the inspiration from this picture. The moment that
we are experiencing APEC or when the news talk about APEC, Hong Kong is also experiencing a
very important pro-democracy movement. We call it “Umbrella Movement” or “Umbrella Revolution”
and the colour of the Umbrella Revolution is yellow ‒ if you know about it.
So, we have the yellow ribbon on the chest. Those people who are … not anti-pro-democracy but
those people who are pro-government, they are … they wear a blue ribbon. So, you may see one or
two pic-tures of policemen wearing the blue ribbon when they are on duty ‒ even though a lot of
people would say that policemen should be neutral to their political view point and should take all
the ribbons out when they are on duty. But then the Hong Kong government would say, „we have
free speech. They are allowed to express their opinion.“ But they … if the policemen want to express
the opinion of a yellow ribbon they are forbidden. So, a different kind of free speech.
The letter here is … I have to explain it maybe, each character. This means the colours, this means
Gold. The gold letter also signifies the courage ‒ the colour of your courage, something like that.
And blue sky ‒ very simple, blue. So, it’s all about colours and how … or about whether the colours is
true and how you would make history.
And I play with words. I have a lot of playful ideas about words. I start with … if you recognize: all
throughout the video there are three characters. And I keep the first one the same all the time. The
first one character means „true“ or „real“ and our slogan for the Umbrella Movement is „we want true
democ-racy”.
So, I have „true“ a lot of things, a „true“ something. The first one that I have is a true blue colour or a
true blue man. It can have many meanings coming from that. So, I also at the … probably you won’t
see it now but this is „true scene“, the scenery. These pictures that I used to generate all these
different colours are from the 26th or 25th riot or … not really riot, but I mean … those (?) police are
beating the general public.
I play with the sound also. And when I play with the sound, then the Cantonese speaking part comes
in. Actually, there is a lot of Cantonese … it’s being marginalized the last two or three years under the
communist policy. They asked the Cantonese speaking … Cantonese TV station to stop making
Cantonese program.
I mean the Mandarin speaking people don’t understand the Cantonese. WE understand. Maybe I
understand 30% of Mandarin but the normal, ordinary speaking I can understand almost 90%.
For them, they understand maybe 0, maybe 5% Cantonese ‒ or even no. So, Mandarin people are
really afraid to deal with people who are speaking the language they don’t understand and so they
always want to stop people speaking Cantonese.
They also think that if we can speak Mandarin they would have more control and we will be like „the
one“, the equal one rather than we have differences. Now, because the Cantonese speaking majority
of people in Hong Kong ‒ really, majority meaning 98% of the people speaking Cantonese ‒ if they
can turn us into Mandarin speaking, probably they can control us. Actually, this is a fear of Hong
Kong people that if we all turn into a Mandarin speaking society, then we become just another city in
China ‒ we are no different actually. So, there are many politics going on, just because of the
language.
And there are also words that I play with masculinity, with the gender or the sex. I mean, the sex elements,
the politics elements are always my interest. You can also find the sex part, maybe the
gender part, there ‒ later. You’ll see the words.
