A historian, also an interdisciplinary artist, engages in a self-dialogue of how to write the history of her city, Hong Kong. Drilling the disparate mines of sights and sounds, she re-examines the power and limitation of ocular epistemology, which favors visual perception as the dominant form of knowing. As she ploughs her way through the scanty and homogenous visual documents available, she re-imagines a city that has a precarious history of struggling to hold onto its look or preserve its architectural integrity at the mercy of real estate development. In response, she re-constructs a visual essay that is also a collage of lost surfaces and shadowy fragments of past existence. Her meditation leaves open the potential meanings of each of the sight-and-sound fragments that seem to have spoken to her as she asks how feasible it is to access the past.
Cited works:
Archive footage permitted by Getty Image – footage by Bollenbacher-Berge and Hongkong Government public service announcements and newsreels.

Vintage still photos are paid Xeroxed copies of original stills at the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Hong Kong Government’s Public Records.

Found feature-length motion pictures include:
Hong Kong Nights (E. Mason HOPPER, 1934 , USA)
The Imp 凶榜 (aka Xiong bang; Dennis YU, 1981 , Hong Kong)
Visible Secret 幽靈人間 (aka Youling renjian; Ann HUI, 2001 , Hong Kong)
The Eye 見鬼 (aka Gin gwai; Oxide PANG, Danny PANY, 2002 , Hong Kong)
Chungking Express 重慶森林 (WONG Kar-wai, 1994 , Hong Kong)
All of a Sudden 驚變 Herman YAU, 1996 , Hong Kong)
Blossom in Rainy May 五月雨中花 (QIN Jian, 1960 , Hong Kong)

這是藝術家的影像歷史默想沈思系列的第一本，為了對過去的可索可追而無法客觀整合重現的一種態度上的積極的確立。一個不斷整容，過往面貌消失淨盡，向來缺乏文化物質保留的香港，成為以經驗為本的史論的一項特殊考題。出路可能在於現象學的思維方向——就是不能察看全景，觸及根基結構，也希望片斷地用耳聽得見，用眼看得到。

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.