VMAC Article

Towards a History of Early Experimental Video Practices in Hong Kong (an excerpt)

Text: Delaney Chieyen Holton

Originally published in Film Quarterly (2025) 78 (3): 29–36

Video is a chiasmatic, chimerical medium, variously narrated through genealogies of cinema, television, or new media. In Hong Kong, video took form as a medium for experimental cultural practice in proximity to alternative film cultures, avant-garde performance, public media advocacy, and political activism, only gaining official recognition as an artistic medium at an institutional level in the mid-1990s. Because of its liminality, and being scattered across multiple publics and spaces of cultural practice, experimental video’s early history easily disappears into the shadow of Hong Kong cinema. How then, can we begin to identify the key terms, events, figures, and critical junctures of video practices in Hong Kong? [1]

As Linda Lai writes, Hong Kong video art has a “dispersive history” scattered under diverse names such as experimental cinema, short film and video, independent film, and documentary, among others. [2] Likewise, Hong Kong video art’s historical connections to performance, cinema, and television disperse video practices into multiple industrial histories, cultures of reception, and technical and institutional infrastructures. In Lai’s words, “There is no readymade singular story of video art in a clearly defined institution waiting to be summed up. We have to find it, construct it and defend it.” [3] The question of video art in Hong Kong is further complicated by the limited arts infrastructure in the city until the late 1990s, which would not offer the framework or resources for practitioners to work in experimental mediums like video until the establishment of the Arts Development Council in 1995. By this time, however, despite the lack of funding, and with limited access to video production tools, artists had already been working with video and sharing work for a decade through social and organizational infrastructure established by cinephile communities and performance collectives. Video absorbed the artistic and curatorial practices shaped in these settings as well as the publics constituted by each of these scenes.

To understand experimental video’s history in Hong Kong, then, it must be considered not simply as a lineage of aesthetic practices, but as a cultural ecology shaped by diverse aspirations. Here, I am informed by Michael Newman’s methodology of crafting a discursive history of video as a cultural form, following the shifting promises associated with the medium. Newman examines the dynamics between technological developments and emergent publics that shape how a medium as plural and dynamic as video coheres. [4] Tracing early video practices in the 1980s as a catalyst for animating a speculative cultural public brings articulation to the ways in which video flickers in and out of historiographical sight by mapping the worlds that come together to render its lenticular history.

[…]

Screen and Stage Intimacies

Many video artists, alongside peers who would later become key figures in Hong Kong’s local film industry such as John Woo and Law Kar, whetted their appetite for moving image through participation in cine clubs [of the 1950s – 70s – ed]. [6] Often formed through the community of editors and contributors to an established publication, as in the example of 大學生活 (College Life) and its associated film society, these communities established a legible practice of linking cinephilia with the cultural and political discourse circulated via print publications. Cine clubs subverted the hegemonic model of film circulation by creating community-led infrastructures for collectively accessing and screening films and engaging in criticism. In this sense, the community-oriented moving image culture of cine clubs laid the foundations for the later formation of artist-run organizational platforms for video, which would follow a similar model of collective governance and experimentation.

火鳥電影會 (Phoenix Cine Club, hereafter PCC), founded in 1973 by Kam Ping Hing, a film lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was among the last of the 1950s–70s cine clubs. It aimed to promote a culture of film appreciation, support the artistic education of public audiences and prospective filmmakers, and offer an alternative platform of critical engagement to the mainstream avenues of distribution. [7] PCC was a significant site of experimentation and community building for artists like [Ellen] Pau, who in 1985 joined as a committee member for the group. As video equipment became increasingly accessible, the PCC served as a space for young artists to share explorations of the new format through dedicated screenings for emergent video practices. The first of these screenings took place in July 1986 at the City Contemporary Dance Company, and was titled “Videotage—The Montage of Four Video Filmmakers,” featuring work by Jim Shum, Neco Lo, Wong Chi-fai, and David Som. [8] A combination of “video” and “montage,” the title captures the genealogical connections between video and film practices in terms of aesthetic vocabularies, spectatorial literacies, and the public of viewers, artists, writers, and other cultural workers that video would inherit from the culture of cine clubs. That is, the PCC (and the broader culture of Hong Kong cinephilia of which it was part) did not simply provide a screening platform for sharing early video work, but was critical for developing a community engaged with and literate in experimental moving image practices. Thus, the PCC modelled a sustained sphere of cultural critique through screenings, publications, and social channels that would inform video’s circulation and reception in the years to follow.

Program notes and publications by the PCC similarly speak to an association between video’s experimental aesthetics and aspirations among moving image practitioners for avant-garde or alternative culture more broadly. From December 1–7, 1986, PCC members, including Pau, organized the Alternative Film & Video Festival at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. With programs presenting work from the UK, Germany, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, the festival served not only as an opportunity for Hong Kong audiences and artists to see local experimental works but also as a means of circulating work by international artists. The catalogue included a series of essays discussing the history of experimental moving image cultures in Hong Kong, the international history of avant-garde visual art practices, and the challenging material conditions for film and video production and circulation. Whispers of the future potential of cable TV to broadcast emergent video work began to appear, anticipating a movement by artists in the early 1990s, advocating for a public access television channel in anticipation of the expansion of cable TV networks in the city. [9]

Deng Lin’s catalogue essay, “Alternative/Phoenix,” for example, speaks to video’s emergent status within the space of alternative film culture, indicating the 1986 festival’s decision to begin accepting video works. (At the time, these were limited to works screened using cinematic methods of projection, excluding installation or other media work.) In general, the catalogue essays reveal the modernist lineage within which the organizers position themselves and their alternative film culture, while seamlessly and without contention absorbing video into this lineage. Focusing on the importance of alternative culture even more than the specifics of film practices, they indicate an understanding of video as relevant not necessarily due to its status as a new moving image format, but rather for its potential as a non-commercial, experimental medium, capable of driving an artistic and political counterculture.

Shortly after the first “Videotage” screening program with the PCC, Pau, [May] Fung, Wong [Chi-fai], and [Comyn] Mo founded Videotage as a collective distinct from Phoenix Cine Club. For most of its first decade, Videotage operated from a single desk in the office space of the interdisciplinary performance troupe 進念二十面體 (Zuni Icosahedron) in Happy Valley. Known for experimental aesthetics such as non-linear, non-causal plots and multimedia staging that favored projected text and gesture over speech, Zuni Icosahedron pioneered avant-garde performance in Hong Kong during the 1980s, providing an alternative to the mainstream theater practices inherited from British and Chinese classical repertoires. Extant friendships between members of the two groups, and the fluidity of their practices across stage and screen using body, sound, and light, made Zuni Icosahedron a befitting gestational space for Videotage’s emergent artistic and curatorial experiments. Early on, Videotage organized only one or two screening programs per year, instead focusing on pooling resources to facilitate access to video equipment and staging occasional workshops on video production methods and international histories of video art. In exchange for the desk space at Zuni Icosahedron’s office, Videotage provided documentation for the group’s performance work. This documentation included conventional performance footage, but at times also took experimental forms, diverging from the standards of linearity, smoothness, and comprehensiveness typically associated with documentation. Born of necessity, the intimacy between the performance and video collectives proved formative for Pau, who would incorporate Zuni Icosahedron documentation footage into work of her own and bring considerations of spontaneity and performance, learned from these collaborations, to bear on her video installations.

Pau’s 1989 愛在瘟疫蔓延時 (Love in the Time of Cholera), for example, reworks video documentation of Zuni Icosahedron’s performance October/Decameron, staged in August 1988 at the National Taiwan Arts Education Centre in Taipei. In the video, Pau uses documentation footage to experiment with video signal manipulations using the limited equipment of a Sony Video8 camera, television monitor, and Betamax player. Tat Ming Pair’s Cantopop song “禁色 (Forbidden Colors)” serves as the video’s soundtrack. The song’s lyrics allude to homosexuality, suggesting queer resonance within the performance’s portrayal of wistful, forbidden love. Pau’s use of the song reverberates with Zuni Icosahedron’s history as a keystone of queer artistic community, as well as with video’s adoption by women and queer artists in particular during this period. In Pau’s video, repetitions of Zuni Icosahedron’s performance unfold at slowed and standard speeds. These images splay out across the screen like piles of live photographs, emphasizing their own circulatory reproducibility and their status as documentation. As the video proceeds, Pau’s recording apparatus becomes increasingly visible. Where the image plane begins squarely perpendicular to the viewer’s gaze, contained to the standard flatness of screened images, the curved surface of Pau’s television screen later comes into view, warping the transmitted footage. The camera moves about to capture the screen’s surface at different angles, causing the duplicated images to bloat and bend as Pau’s recording within a recording compresses the distance between transmission and image-capture.

The artist writes in a set of undated notes that “both the screen and its container” are constituent parts of the video apparatus, and as a result, play an integral role in “reshap[ing] video into a plastic form.” [10] Distinguishing between video as an “enlarged surface” when projected and the shape it takes on a television monitor, for example, Pau reminds us that video cannot simply be defined as a cluster of new electronic formats of moving image but must be understood with regard to its physicality and formal specificities. Love in the Time of Cholera’s use of performance documentation as the source material for videographic manipulation emphasizes this difference between video as immaterial image secondary to its indexical referent, and video as a structure and practice. Yet the conception of video that emerges from Pau’s practice as such is not simply a matter of medium specificity. Nor can video’s intimacies with cinephilia and performance cultures be reduced to a straightforward notion of intermediality. Rather, the artist’s focus on the technological-material specifics of video speak to an interest in the infrastructure of video practices in Hong Kong.

The medium’s entwinement with cine clubs, and with Zuni Icosahedron, historicizes the formation of a video public at the intersection of multiple social worlds. Further, it speaks to the emergence of a broader set of social practices and commitments associated with the medium, alongside the artists’ technical and formal explorations. Pau’s practice illustrates these distinctions, with her infrastructural concerns becoming more explicit in subsequent video works and the expansion of her practice in the 1990s into social organizing and cultural advocacy beyond programming for Videotage.

Video Practices On- and Offscreen

[…]

[I]n 1994, members of Zuni Icosahedron, Videotage, and Video Power organized advocacy efforts for the establishment of a public-access television channel. Their organizing activities took the review process for local television broadcasting licenses (which were to be renewed at the midway point of a twelve-year term begun in 1988) as an opportunity to garner support for their proposed channel. They also hoped to evaluate public interest in media affairs more broadly. Artist-organizers conducted meetings to discuss their demands, designed surveys for the general public and government representatives, corresponded with government officials to collaborate and share information, and researched international case studies of public-access channels in the US, Australia, and Europe. Aspirations for the channel, as articulated in these planning documents, center on freedom of expression, democratization of media infrastructure, civic engagement, the creation of a platform for minority voices, and encouragement of a culture of creativity and sharing for everyone, not just artists. [13] Ultimately, the proposal for a dedicated public access channel was rejected. (Instances of video artists broadcasting their work on public television, usually to a confused, lukewarm reception, are extant, however.) Such efforts, while unsuccessful, revealed much about these artists’ investments within and beyond their creative work. Importantly, the process brought articulation to the idea of video as a broad media public beyond artists and cinephiles, cohered through shared media infrastructure. The mobilization of video as a public in this way speaks to an imagination of video as a set of cultural practices not confined to artistic production, but inclusive of a variety of social, technological, and political operations.

When considered within the history of video’s emergence in cinephile and performance artist communities, these commitments clarify how video catalyzed artists’ desires for shaping Hong Kong’s art and cultural policy. Video emerged at a moment when a generation of young artists was returning from studies abroad, developing practices that exceeded previous conceptions of what Hong Kong art could mean, and seeking out structures to exhibit and share this work. As political tensions heightened before the specter of handover, many of these linked artistic communities found the conventional channels for public engagement, political discourse, and creative expression insufficient for the rising stakes of cultural production. Within this milieu, video’s potential for subversive, experimental aesthetics (demonstrated through its proximity to alternative film and performance) and its political uses (modeled by artists and filmmakers from the politicized cinephilia culture of the 1970s, through contemporary collectives like Video Power) cast video as a medium of agitation and criticality in alignment with aspirations for a revitalized local arts infrastructure. Video’s connections with cinematic screen cultures and broadcast media also positioned it as an accessible medium for which the literacies of consumption (and production) already would have been familiar to mass public audiences. The intersection of these conditions creates a multidimensional history marked by the inextricability of artistic and extra-artistic practices, and uniquely positioned video as an opportune aperture through which to channel artists’ evolving aspirations for Hong Kong art and media.

(This excerpt is reprinted with the permission of the author and the publisher, Film Quarterly.)

Notes

[1] In posing this question, I draw principally from Linda Lai’s scholarship on the history of media art in the region. However, much research on these topics has been led also by curators, artists, archivists, or researchers with other titles, and shared through museum and archiving institutions, moving image festivals, and community organizations via channels beyond academic publishing.
[2] Linda Chiu-han Lai, “Video Art in Hong Kong: Organologic Sketches for a Dispersive History,” Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook (Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014), 14–93.
[3] Lai, “Video Art in Hong Kong.”
[4] Michael Z. Newman, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (Columbia University Press, 2014).
[5] [omitted]
[6] Emilie Sin-yi Choi maps the complex of competing cinephilia cultures in Hong Kong from the Cold War cinephilia of the 1960s—which shaped publications like Chinese Student Weekly and College Weekly into key sites for generating Hong Kong identity, political imagination, and modernist cultural sensibilities—to a more radical, politicized cinephilia that emerged in the 1970s. These were largely led through the organizing efforts of Mok Chiu-yu and enacted through groups such as Underground Showings (Dixia yinghua), DWARF Film Club, and Cactus Film Club. See Emilie Sin-yi Choi, “A Critical Study of The 70’s Biweekly and Its Political Cinematic Practices,” in The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong, ed. Lu Pan (Hong Kong University Press, 2023). See also Choi’s article in the present issue.
[7] Phoenix Cine Club, “Memorandum and Articles of Association of Phoenix Cine Club Limited” (Phoenix Cine Club, 1977).
[8] Phoenix Cine Club, “Phoenix Cine Club Presents Videotage—The Montage of Four Video Filmmakers” (Phoenix Cine Club, 1986).
[9] Roger Garcia, “Out of Cinema,” Alternative Film & Video Festival 1986 (Phoenix Cine Club and Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1986), np.
[10] Ellen Pau, “Notes: Television, Video and the Art World,” Ellen Pau Archive, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.
[11] [omitted]
[12] [omitted]
[13] “Public Access Channel on Cable Television,” 1994, Ellen Pau Archive, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.
[14] [omitted]

(The views and opinions expressed in this article published are those of the author/s. They do not necessarily represent the views of VMAC.)

 

 

Staff Pick

Telefishion and Videotage, 2002

Aside from public access TV, Videotage had worked with commercial broadcasters in bringing video art onto the small screen.

In 2002, Videotage worked with Asia Television (ATV) on a video showcase aired alongside the quirky Telefishion at midnight. It featured video art, computer animation, and other experimental works. According to SCMP Young Post, the visuals featured included “a single strand of hair caught in a spinning CD,” “a segment of Chinese opera on a five-second loop that is repeated continually,” and “a computer animation of a robotic dog.”

As mysterious as the show’s late-night timeslot was, its title was equally enigmatic: in English it was called Afterhourz, and its Chinese name, Can’t Stop the Music, served as a nod to Telefishion [1], with videos interspersed between pop tunes.

For its debut, it first aired on the broadcaster’s English-language channel, ATV World, for two nights before moving to its Cantonese counterpart, ATV Home, where the artworks were shown every 15 minutes. However, Videotage’s internal records showed that its members had no clue about the airing time or channel. Despite being broadcast to a mass audience, the show’s viewership may have remained minimal.

A mainstream platform for experimental video works was undoubtedly exciting, hence Videotage had hoped to continue curating other art-focused mini-programmes for mass broadcast. Yet with ATV long since defunct, all that remains is a VHS tape waiting to be digitised—a relic relegated to an obscure slice of Hong Kong’s television history.

[1] See Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/archive/342065

 

 

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VMAC, Videotage’s collection of video and media arts, is a witness to the development of video and media culture in Hong Kong over the past 35 years. Featuring artists from varied backgrounds, VMAC covers diverse genres including shorts, video essays, experimental films and animations. VMAC Newsletter, published on a bi-monthly basis, provides an up-to-date conversation on media arts and their preservation while highlighting the collection and its contextual materials.