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- Linda C.H. LAI
Photo by Linda Lai: Open City London Documentary Festival's opening event, June 16, 2011
To me, documentary is a total event that cannot be fully considered without taking into account the intention of the maker, relation between the maker and the documented, the use of the work in its life-span of distribution and circulation, the conversations it invokes, and finally other on-going discourses in which it works out its politics.
Textbook discussion on documentary film has often been caught up in issues of evidence of truth rooted in the camera’s being there and the photographic image’s indexical transparency. The shift to clarification of documentary as a genre, thus its visual and narrative practice as conventions, often results in reinforcing the acceptance of documentary works’ narrative constructed-ness …
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- Elliot W.Y. LEUNG
FPC Forum: ‘What’s in a Talking Head: narrated selves and event structure”
2010.06.26 / FPC / 2:30-4:30 pm / Linda C.H. LAI
 Some belated thoughts…
Absolutely fascinating talk and materials; materials which – as was acknowledged during the presentation – lend itself to so many possible frames of analysis, approaches, and appealable to various knowledge/capital fields (Bourdieu), that an inter-disciplinary analysis becomes an unimaginably arduous endeavour, the success of which, nonetheless, would no doubt do justice to the richness of the theoretical mosaic invoked.
The challenge – or problem, depending on how one sees it – seems to be that ‘talking heads’ as an object of analysis as well as aesthetic gaze crosses so many conceptual boundaries that 10+ very different essays can be conceived, each published in a different journal in a different knowledge/citation field:
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- Kimburley Choi
Video stills from Linda Lai's…
Trespassing and a tale of cities…
Trespassing world cities 《搖擺過路人》(2005) is a composite of Linda Lai’s tourist-video-style travelogues. The opening is a low angle shot showing a woman walking, and the camera seems to be in a bag; then it cuts to the tile of New Delhi in 2004, the pan shot of the bridge in New York City in 2001, the tracking shots of Frankfurt city space in 2001, Taipei in 2003, and New Delhi in 2004. The intercuts between tracking shots of these three cities and the following elevators shots of different cities indicate the similarities of these “modern” cities and we (the videomaker and the audiences) cannot easily recognize their differences.
Although ethnographers nowadays acknowledge the constructedness of ethnographic fields, Schneider (2008) argues that …
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"Floor Drama 2" (2010 / Linda Lai / video floor projection)
- Linda C.H. Lai
Voices Seen, Images Heard (2009), which will be shown for the first time in Hong Kong, tonight at FPC’s inauguration, has been shown in two different festivals in April, 2010. I have been most enlightened by the various ways audience, critics and curators communicated back to me about my work. It opens up new angles for self understanding. In this short preview, I’ll cite some of these views…
No single story; collecting, collating, and ‘writing’ history
“Voices Seen, Images Heard is an alternative historiography written in the form of visual ethnography and travelogue. The director tries to write the history of Hong Kong with a variety of her collections including photos, paintings, movies, and newsreels, but …
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至微的美學經濟／極盡的概念發揮
– Linda C.H. Lai
During the count-down fortnight to our inauguration exhibition (opening May 22), the FPC team had a series of studio meetings, dubbed ‘Studiologue’, in which we went through issues of artistic rigor of individual works, logistics, communication plans, display arrangement and so on, to the last possible details.
On May 11 (Tuesday), we met in the studio to get a general preview of the artworks each of us would present, matching concepts, purposes, display strategies and construction procedures. After that, I proposed the following guiding principles:
*simplicity of form, economy of presentation, tenacity of concept
*leave no component that is not integral to the concept: remove anything that is decorative and distracting …
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