I don’t produce a lot of art and I haven’t produced any new works for a long time. I think I am kind of
a little bit strange in the way that I think a lot of people know me as an artist by a work that I did in
2002/2003 ‒ which is more than 10 years ago. And that artwork actually in Hong Kong nobody has
ever seen (laughs).
So, they have only kind of heard about that piece. By the time I did that project ‒ which was a
webcam sex project ‒ the artwork was censored by the Art Institute of Chicago. And then I got a lot
of exhibition opportunities and attention to talk about issues that I wanted to raise. And then it
evolved, when I came back to Hong Kong, I haven’t produced any new works until last year I was
invited, I was in the show ParaSite where I did an installation work which was kind of an extension
from the work that I produced in 2002.
The project was called „The Impossibility of Having Sex with 500 Men in a Month ‒ I Am an Oriental
Whore“. It was an installation, with a video, with photos, with a whole month of journal, of diary. And
that was exhibited in many places, the whole installation ‒ but it has never been shown in Hong
Kong. Until a year ago when I was in the ParaSite show, I did a personal archive installation collecting
a lot of things that I have been collecting in the past 10 years that is related to that piece. But I am
still not showing the piece itself, but I collected and systematically categorized things that are
surrounding that piece and created an installation piece.
If we just put it in a more basic level, they are all objects, right. Just like what I said the other day, any
objects, the value of it, the cultural value, or the monetary value of it is very much a construction by
institutions. And for me, this is what … an artwork is very much mediated by all these things. I don’t
really believe in a certain kind of intrinsic sort of value in the way. But I think the intrinsic value is very
much kind of something very personal.
But I think, if you ask me in general, what is an artwork, then I think artwork is very much ‒ to put it
simple ‒ it’s a construction by all these different institutions in this game.
I could never really make a „work“, so to speak, that could pretty much fit into the existing context of
museums or private galleries and so and so and so. Because I think, in our existing world, it is just …
in this system, museums or galleries, they are all very much ultimately looking for a very complete
object. And that object could be easy to communicate in this context of art.
For example ‒ just to make it more … to exemplify: my work was … I did a performance, of trying to
have sex with 500 men online in a month and then I documented all this kind of process and
researching on the age and where they are from and documented all the images and also the
conversations and so on.
I thought the whole process… by the time, it was when cybersex was just starting, I thought I was
really raising a very critical question at that moment
So, I thought, that was ‒ as an object, as an artwork ‒, it was very meaningful, because it was very
generative.
I am very bad in creating an object, I guess. And also, in order to create … in order to be successful in
playing that game, you need to have an object, ultimately. But a lot of my work, I think, ultimately,
there is no object. Or the object is just so complex that it has many different things in that it doesn’t
lead to a very coherent … what we see as “a piece of work”.
