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/ Kongkee / Wendy Tai / Phoebe Man / Woo Ling-ling / Justin Wong / Linda Lai / Cedric Maridet / Hector Rodriguez / Gina Wong
A-USUAL OBJECTS
A fund-raising event for the AUW Support Foundation for the Asian University for Women, Bangladesh// Saturday, July 25, 2009, 4:00-8:00pm //
curated by Linda LAI // produced by Gina WONG // sponsored by EXPERIMENTA
/ Linda C.H. LAI /
Come Stroke the Perfect Surface
2003 / 26.67" x 40". C-print, Lambda printing on metallic paper, mounted on Dibond aluminium composite panel
From the "Trespassing World Cities" series
| A car is a car, a tree is just a tree. But a woman in the photographic and moving image media often bears the burden of having to represent something... In a lomographic exercise with the "A" shutter at early night fall, the sheer play with light and chance generated a world that is totally self-sufficient within the frame space marked out by a woman's body, bearing no reference to any text for cultural reading, resisting any attempt at all for depth hermeneutics. (Linda) |
Courtesy of Linda Lai and Experimenta
A poem written by Theresa Junko Mikuriya for this photograph:
I stroke the perfect surface, hoping it will reveal
Some sweet nectar of wisdom
As to how I may proceed.
Yet my thumb to and fro
First in circular motion
Then back and forth it goes,
The glossy sheen yields nothing,
Not a single drop undone.
My nail digs ever so slightly
Its blunt edge may provoke
A friendly tickle
Or the burning quiver of an itch.
Maybe you do shrug a lttle
One finger now two, grazing at your flawless shell
Yet you give me nothing,
No smile no hint at all.
I scratch and scrape and chisel
I pick at the ends of your scab
I crunch and chew and spit you out.
But no, you give me nothing,
Nothing you give at all.
Egg yolk tears
Streak sideways
I'd rather see you laugh
Maybe I'll break into a run then
And catch you after all.
I follow your trail breathless
Up and down I go
My body hurdles
Doubt flusters
Yet taut you stand resilient
Like there's nothing,
Nothing
There at all.
Spread across the asphalt
Ssshh!
I hear the flow of your blood
Each capillary distended
With the screech of the wheel
The honk of the car
The thousand feet a shuffle.
And that face
In the piercing wail of the night
Hardens into nothing.
For there had been nothing there at all.
(2003 / in Cryptoglyph: dialogues in many tongues in the hidden crevices of an open city, published January 2004 )
ARTIST'S BIO
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Linda Lai is a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies (NYU), currently full-time faculty at City University of Hong Kong's School of Creative Media, and Expertise Group Leader for the School's Critical Intermedia Studies. She is a trans-disciplinary artist, and has been writer and independent curator for contemporary media art. Her works have a strong concern for language and micro/meta-narrativity, grounded in a feminist sensibility that integrates critical theory, film theories, visual ethnography and history-writing. Most of her works have an auto-ethnographic dimension. Her video art, installation and digital works have been shown in exhibitions and art and film/video festivals in Paris, Oberhausen, Barcelona, Taipei, New Delhi, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Kaohsiung and Hong Kong. Lai is the founder and Artistic Director for a new media group the Writing Machine Collective. She also co-founded the art incubator, Experimenta, with Gina Wong, to facilitate emerging artists and curators to conduct their artistic/curatorial experiments. Among her various academic and art writings, she has published a +280-page photo-text dialogue with Theresa Junko Mikuriya, partially supported by the Philippe Charriol Foundation, titled Cryptoglyph: Dialogues in Many Tongues in the Hidden Crevices of an Open City (2004).
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