Non-place ▪ Other Space is a compilation video work based on my many years of visual ethnography whereby I walked the city and collected images as a personal video diary. This work compiles fragments of the city space in Hong Kong and Macao (1991-2008) to assert the possibility of many spaces and temporal sheets in one single framed discourse. It attempts the states between disappearance and emerging, visible and concealed. “Walking through” is a precarious experience. One penetrates, dives into, emerges and immerses in… In one moment, I see, therefore the video camera records for me; in another moment, the camera sees and retains, then I discover. Automatism leads. Virtual sounds I barely grasp in my mind, and fragments of a voice I have long forgotten, all blended into the placeless other space of non-place. Places and lived moments of disappearance return as the in-between, neither monumental, nor illusionary.

Known for her work in intermedia arts and media archaeology, Hong Kong-based transdisciplinary artist and scholar Linda Chiu-han Lai brings together her videography, experimental arts and pedagogy onto a new research-creation ontology that is at once critical, new-materialist, nomadic-feminist and speculative. Her works often explore time and narrativity in spatial terms — complex linearity, thick descriptions, scaling, montage, and image as objectile. Central to Lai’s works is her historiographic experiments, especially the moving image’s power to work against grand narratives and “central conflict” assumptions. In particular, she concentrates on videography’s performative functions to materialize the history of everyday life as indeterminate processes, and as fragmented yet rich miniatures with near drama potentials. Prompted by edia-archaeological concern, Lai moves beyond the documentary as a genre to focus on “documentary impulses” to re-envision the history of the moving image alongside other art forms as mnemonic practices. Currently, she revisits the video essay’s relevance to contemporary times.

Lai’s works have been published in short film, experimental and documentary festivals, and have travelled as part of Hong Kong video art showcases, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Open City London Documentary Festival, LOOP Barcelona, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, the Fourth State of Water (CoCA, Torun, Poland), Women Make Waves Film Festival (Taipei), International Women’s Film Festival in Seoul, and more. Solo retrospective-screenings were presented at the Experimental Film/Video Festival in Macao (EXiM 2015), Seoul (EXiS 2017), Centro de Creación Contemporanea de Andalucia (Cordoba, 2021) and the LSK School of Creativity (Hong Kong, 2025). Lai’s video works are held in collections of the M-plus, Asia Art Archive and Video Bureau (Guangzhou, Beijing). Her on-line video zine project D-Normal/V-Essay with Floating Projects is a winner of Ars Electronica’s “State of the Art(ists)” 2022. Between 2016 and 2021, she published two issues of Video Manifestos, involving over 80 artists from Hong Kong and around the world.

Lai’s 25 years of faculty life at the School of Creative Media (SCM) has been a vibrant journey in search of meaningful extensions of her PhD training in Cinema Studies (Tisch, NYU). Officially retired from SCM in July 2023, she has remained an active artist, writer, researcher and art facilitator. She held her mixed media solo show “Folds, Wrinkles and Crevices of the Everyday” in Oct-Nov 2025, marking her moves into interspecies thinking and advanced research in media archaeology as art. She was Leader of the Oberhausen Seminar at the 72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 28 April to 3 May 2026.