Ellen Pau’s The Great Movement Stimulates Human Sensitivity

Description

Navigating through Ellen Pau’s ‘The Great Movement’, the atmosphere is dark, quiet, pregnant with pauses for feel and thought. The exhibition takes its title from the 1996 work ‘The Great Movement: Red Stock’, reformulated specifically for this show and on display at the entrance; it displays a red dot at the centre of a palm, traversing the transparent screen as if mimicking a comet trail.

A graduate from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ellen Pau’s interest in human body could be traced back to her diploma in Diagnostic Radiography in 1982 and the fact she worked as a radiographer in Queen Mary Hospital in the presence of humans, bodies, life and death.

Combining historical and new, site-specific works, ‘The Great Movement’ has a human sensitivity running throughout. ‘Video is a Hole’ (1990) refers to the rise of technology and its role in democracy, the proliferation of different points of view, and harks to the book Feedback: Television Against Democracy by David Joselit. While television follows the constellation of stardust whirling around the afterlife of a black hole, video engages the fleeting life stories, lost journeys and ordinary encounters that make up the world surrounding us.