Hong Kong Artist Anson Mak Explores Kwun Tong, Disappearance and Memory

Description

“After I turned the milestone age of fifty, I came to realise that my pursuit of art has nothing to do with the artistic style, nor self-expression. Instead, it is to entice people (audience) to feel and revisit the shared experiences that we are bound to go through in this world – the good; the happiness; the pain; the death; the union; the separation; the existence.”

– Anson Mak

Mak’s solo exhibition, entitled Caméra-stylo As Such, features two sets of new works: One Place, Two Systems, Ten Years, a lens-based media installation that delves into and documents the urban changes in the Kwun Tong neighbourhood, as well as objects and landscape of the Kwun Tong Town Centre through photography and moving image; and Never Cross A River Twice, a single-channel film which explores the notion of disappearance, memory, and ways of seeing.

Through sounds and images that depend on and yet, detach from relative reality, the artist revisits the shared collective experience and the multitude of feelings aroused. As an expert in experimental ethnography and manipulation of super 8 film in the digital era, she believes that lens-based media and ethnography are the key to making the connection possible. The exhibition is companioned by a series of outdoor screenings and artist talks.

An Associate Professor in the Academy of Visual Arts at HKBU, Mak has produced film/video works shown in many festivals and countries, including Hong Kong International Film
Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Vancouver International Film Festival, Digital Cinema Seoul, as well as Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. In the last few years, she  interested in research-creative works, bridging conventional researches methods and creative art works in the field of visual ethnography.