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So I don't really know sometimes if it's because of culture

Leung Chi Wo
008 / 6 November 2014
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Commissioned for the Marrakech Biennale in 2012, this is a project that explores the notion of diasporas intersected with the urban context of Hong Kong, and inflected with post-colonial perspectives in a multi-layered reflexive narrative. The audio-visual installation is a dialogue constructed using interviews with two Moroccan women who lived in Hong Kong, one Moroccan-born and one French-born, about their relations with the places where they lived and came from. Carefully transcribed, edited and re-arranged from the interviews, two monologues were written based on the interviewees' original wording and recited by two Hong Kong-based French male artists, Laurent Gutierrez of Map Office (b. 1966, Morocco) and Cédric Maridet (b. 1973, France). These monologues in English were edited into a dialogue and as voiceover of two synchronized video projections of Hong Kong's Victoria harbour and peak overlaid with the Arabic translation.

 

Both Gutierrez and Maridet were also interviewed on their personal artistic career in Hong Kong. A monologue script was produced together with Leung and was read in front of the camera by the interviewee in their own voice in French with English subtitle and the videos presented below were played with two separate digital screens/monitors with headsets.

 

 

 

 

Read an interview with Leung Chi Wo as part of Platform 008 here.

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Film Artist Project Exhibitions North Africa Hong Kong

About the author

Leung Chi Wo

Leung Chi Wo was born in Hong Kong in 1968, and has a Master of Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Leung co-founded Para/Site Art Space in 1996, and was the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council fellowship and the Urban Council Award of the Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial in 1997. He won first prize in sculpture from the Philippe Charriol Art Foundation in 1995.

 

Leung has exhibited internationally. In 2001, his site-specific project was exhibited in the first Hong Kong pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include Busan Biennale (2006), Guangzhou Triennial (2008), Lights Out in Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo (2008), “Depot of Disappearance in quartier21/MuseumsQuartier, Vienna (2009) and No Soul For Sale in Tate Modern, London (2010). Leung has also been a visiting artist to academies and universities worldwide, such as Institut Kunst of Hochschule Luzern and Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais in Switzerland, Monash University and Australian National University in Australia, and has participated in artist-in-residence programmes in New York, Banff, Vienna and Sapporo.

 

His multi-disciplinary artistic practice ranges from photography and video to text, performance and installation, focusing on the relationship between anticipation, perception and understanding in communication, mostly in an urban context. However, his research interests include art & architecture, Hong Kong art & culture, institutional critique, and so on.