Between Waiting And Resisting: A Video Installation on Nostalgia and Novelty

Description

Artist Au Man Kit scrutinises the everyday ordinariness of home, of work, of day-to-day life in a video artwork filmed at Au’s family restaurant and the local playground just steps away.

In examining the detailed texture of his surroundings, Au renders the everyday visible: the specifics of this restaurant, including the fittings, fixtures, fabric touched with timeworn care, and people his entire life. In Between Waiting and Resisting, Au focuses on the downtime, the dead periods between meal service, when food prep happens or when there is nothing to do but wait for customers. We feel the stifling monotony even as the very objects and acts that create it are rendered beautiful. While life inside the restaurant is all too relentlessly real, is real life happening elsewhere?

In Hong Kong, a city that is almost defined by rapid turnover and novelty seeking, there is also nostalgic longing for preserving old family businesses against the proliferation of trendy new coffee shops and hipster bars. When longed for progress contains alienation from the things we hold dear, how are we to reconcile our competing identities and needs?