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About this episode

Phoebe Hui – [art]attack 26 Creative intervention is closely connected with my way of living. It stimulates me to reflect on things normally taken for granted. If thinking is infinite, we may never stop sprouting thoughts. The nature of thinking as a continuous motion or becoming, and the ways it is constantly open to change formed the fundamental trajectory of my artistic strategies. I would consider my artwork as a portrait that captures my ephemeral thoughts, inexpressible in words, in an effort to preserve their singular fluidity. I whisper what I think through my artwork. Most of my works show a strong interest in defamiliarisation of, and experimentation with, text and images, in order to discover new possibilities and to transgress ordinary boundaries. I often work with the transformation of text into image and play with the written forms of different languages. The idea is closely linked with metagraphics and Chinese pictogram. My poster for the International Experimental Art Festival “3rd.txt: images + media”, which was selected by Xpress (vol 6 .2003), a journal of the Hong Kong Designers Association is one of the examples. To highlight fluidity, I let one medium become another. This passage across media expresses the fluidity of thought and action. I also construct new ways of seeing text, as pure point, line, shape and movement, beyond the function of the language as a medium for transmit thoughts & meaning. Text becomes a visual element, to be perceived for it own sake, not service as a vehicle for communication. In response to one lecture about the “letterist” group in post-war France, I invented my own new written language to “rewrite” an excerpt from Ways of seeing by John Berger, using graphic elements (point, lines and surfaces). I am interested in the technique of détournement, the reuse of pre-existing parameters – for instance, letters of the alphabet and other symbols – in order to recombine into a new assembly. The organisation of my new written forms operates with the same matrix of alphabetical symbols as in everyday language. It is generated based on polygon inside a circle of alphabetical symbols, where each corner of the polygon represents a vowel (a-e-i-o-u). Since each letter is allocated within a particular matrix on the perimeter of the circle, new written forms can be created by drawing lines to link up these letters according to the spelling of sentences in some source text (in this case, a segment of a book by John Berger). The resulting work, “Metagraphics: Jamjoy”, is now on permanent exhibit at the School of Creative Media. My work also engages with the relationship between narrative and non-narrative elements in sequential art. I consider comics as an artistic medium, yet only the tiniest fraction of the possibilities of this medium has ever been fully demonstrated. The fundamental characteristic of comics is the sequential arrangement of images. The experience of motion and time in comics is sustained through the reader’s and viewer’s imagination, which fills in the gap between panels, produces the illusion of motion and passage of time. I am interested in exploring the untapped potentials of existing forms, pushing them beyond their normally accepted boundaries and opening up the possibilities of what this art can be. One of the exploration directions of my comics is playing with the understanding of narration in comics and how comics composed, read and understood. One of my series of comics, “What I think comics is: #04 Phoebe’s Vaudevillian Park”, exhibited in Parasite (2005), is a spatial comics installation exploring narration in comics, for which I received a prestigious grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. The installation is composed of six rooms. Each room represents a panel. When the audience walks through the rooms, the experience of encountering the same character in different rooms, and the uncertainty of whether it really is the same character owing to the constantly changing face, freeze the illusion of the passage of time across panels in comics. A new reading experience is thereby created. The reader becomes part of my comics rather than an observer. http://www.earthlinginger.com

• Release Date

  Nov 3, 2009

• Runtime

  05:22