Artists’ Creative Responses to To Liv(e)
By Bo Choy, Eric Yip, Tim Tim Cheng, Wency Lam and Yan Wai Yin Winnie
Bo Choy’s Response
The Night of Hong Kong
Finding lost words, turning to see, still turning
without reading, that one page in the whole library
Of what meaning we are looking for?
Tasted enough of that city’s silence, cars are honking
clogged in the corner, roads cannot stand waiting
like an illness, or is this the most normal after all?
No words, only the night teaches honesty
Cars move, buses arrive, carried away some of the waiting
But that does not include language, what is spoken sounds like advertisements
What is written down turned into a riddle, who will guess?
That forgotten future that has already happened?
The answer is stored always in the sealed past
buildings that have been demolished and redeveloped.
Everything has already changed, or it is as if nothing has changed
That numbness to mistakes, ignorance to emptiness
That destruction brought on by practicality, pain brought on by trends
The night slows down its footsteps, only a few more hours before its expiry date
Who is interested in reading those ingeniously poetic contract clauses?
They only serve to compress that already limited life
Who is willing to dawn, even though the night is a kind of mistake?
No words. The night wind, bitterly cold, awakens me
Like a lamp, when turned on, the wider the space
The shorter the limit of its light
And in a few hours, everything is light enough to fade like history
The empty billboards illuminate the empty streets
Who will consume, that non-existent present?
Only that painting, that promise in technocratic speech
That billboard of false beauty, that nauseating infrastructure
Can traverse through the dark, till tomorrow, forever illuminating
By Chan Chi Tak
translated by Bo Choy
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More about Bo: https://bochoy.com/news-%2F-about
Eric Yip’s Response
Travelogue
after Italo Calvino
Along its streets you found things existing only by reconstruction: the sky patched with marbled lapis, funerary bouquets of floral nomenclature, streetlamps relentlessly distributing their pointillistic light. Only the blizzard appeared real. Snow drifted down bridely, disguising the texture of surfaces. In the noodle shop you learnt that erasure no longer existed, as there was nothing true left to erase. Fluorescent rods vibrated your cochlea like liquefied mosquitoes. From your satchel you extracted your expeditionary map and added another X.
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On more cautious inspection you noticed the gradual disbanding of objects. A handless clock. Stacks of piano pedals. Bell tongues in landfills. One thousand years ago, Su Shi dreamed of stones that, in cavernous torrent, articulated their selves as bells. A disbeliever, he sought to hear their gonging himself. It is because I have recorded them, he thought, that these stones exist, that they are real. You considered the mythological strata of history, story upon story, fiction mineralizing in truth. On every building a national flagpole, a lightning rod for the eye. Each thing, Spinoza said, strives in its existence.
*
Though leaving did not exist within the city’s vernacular, you sensed that inhabitants were constantly seeking proverbial alternatives to describe the leaving inside them. The mirror’s borders hides the most secrets. A knot undone is one more journey taken. The symbol is rosier than the rose. From your sky-suite you listened to the highway’s petrol intermezzo. Rest assured you were real and definable without the need for external perception. A day before your scheduled departure you were invited to the Cataloguer’s office where samples were arranged in order of dated disappearance: avalanche, architrave, apothecary, apple, touch.
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More about Eric: https://www.eric-yip.com/
Tim Tim Cheng’s Response
are you telling me
heavens are no place for nostalgia I can't hand myself over
to the past I'm here so are questions asked long ago
dance the dance horse the horse boat the boat
I won't talk about what I can't live without leave that for geopolitics
couplets the hinge of my mother's chest to leave
is to step into a new body to stay too the second person
is no way out desires won’t disarm when only one of us is real
our proof of address cut ears return to sender
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More about Tim Tim: https://www.timtimcheng.com/
Wency Lam’s Response
15/7/2024
I am writing from the transit gate between Hong Kong and London.
Hong Kong in its 80s-90s is like a nostalgic life that I have never lived.
Blurry like the black and white television, we reminisce with all its chaos and complexities.
Memories represented by songs that came out before I was born, but somehow ingrained in my identity as a Hong Kong person. I love these songs, but I don’t know how to sing them.
香港, a transit port.
The city is flooded by waves of change, each of us stranded on islands of generational, educational, and cultural misunderstandings.
Rubie’s accent, the language, John’s accent, the dad’s Cantonese accent…
Does the English language empower her to speak the way she speaks, think the way she thinks?
There is a type of ticket, that determines where you can go, where you can stay.
How much are people willing to pay for this ticket called a passport? I want to know the answer from different passport holders.
What makes us refugees or not refugees?
Some people can afford to buy a ticket.
Some people cannot afford a ticket, but the world allows them onboard.
And some people cannot afford the ticket, but the world pushes them away.
What is the most important 23kg of your life that you bring with you?
Is it the anxiety of never going back, the guilt of leaving, or the trauma that you cannot leave behind?
“You Hong Kong people? Aren’t you one of us?”
Who are the Hong Kong people? We lack the words to describe who we are.
“I had to run from one to the other, shutting them…”
We run from people of the other, to people of the other. When will we stop running? Is it when we can finally change what we cannot change?
Past, present, here, there.
There is always someone else responsible for what we don’t want to be responsible for.
If we are all victims, how do we find peace?
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More about Wency: https://wencylam.com/
Yan Wai Yin Winnie’s Response
Dear Anna,
How’s life up in the air? It’s lovely that I only miss you on sunny days, as if the clearer sky will bring us closer, even though London has been mostly grey. As I write, I realise we are now 7 years apart. Our home has a new term, if not a pseudonym, that simplifies our nuances into a plain. I have been away for almost a year now, and it will take another year until I fly back there. My longing sometimes shrinks into tiny stones, sinking down to nowhere.
Lately, I am frequently asked if I am part of a diaspora or if I am creating work in response to such identity, and I always say no. The other day, I met Simon again, after encounters in Hong Kong, London, and now New York, and I finally came to the realisation that home is a constellation, increasingly so. The stinging discomfort of being reminded as an alien, the collapsing sense of time/place due to countless video calls across time zones, reminds me of my continuously unfolding new identities shaped by the events I experience, the people I care for, and even the slang or accent I have picked up along the way.
I cried between sleeps, if not every time I woke up, for a whole week while moving from London to New York. Now, I find myself even further from home, albeit for a short period of six months. The receptionist assured me I'd forget about home after two weeks, urging gratitude for the many reminders of Hong Kong in New York. A guard asked if I wanted to become an American; another passerby wondered if I was English, as I counted down the days until I could reunite with friends at a sticky barbecue joint in Shek Kip Mei. 'An American dream,' they say. But 'dreaming' holds only one meaning in my mind.
Throughout last year, as my fellows and I engaged in vigorous discussions about our home countries and their conflict situations, I occasionally joked about how our once-colonised home boasts a promising internet and transportation system. I have been studying greening operations, the development of urban trees, and beautification schemes throughout Hong Kong's history – a series of actions by the Crown government that imposed British modernity on what was once a barren rock, transforming it into a global trading hub. However, it is from these layers of entanglement that colonial residues sustain ongoing systematic violence, perpetuating the hierarchy between the urbanised city centre and remote villages, displacing not just generations of human and non-human actors. The unjustified felling of trees and the deterioration of unique biodiversity in this tropical region seem to evoke another form of barrenness.
As Tuan Yi-Fu writes, “Naming is power – the creative power to call something into being, to render the invisible visible, to impart a certain character to things.” I was born in 1994, and in my memory, the Hong Kong Orchid tree, as a logo of the Urban Council, only vaguely exists on my parents' heavily used public library card. It still somehow lingers. When I gaze into the distance, knowing the neon signs have been taken down one by one, turned into objects displayed in a white cube, sometimes I doubt if my home is merely a place listed as an emergency contact, a passport proving an ambiguous existence, or a body that contains fragmented subjects and objects that remind me of a distant place.
I only recently learned that we were once called 'Hongies' when I watched Evans Chan’s To Liv(e). I've also been asked how we refer to ourselves, whether as 'HongKong-ian' or by some other name. Unlike earlier waves of emigration, contemporary borders seem to inspire the formation of new communities and alternative expressions of solidarity, rather than silencing voices. How, then, can we withhold these new names or identities, and how can we disperse and connect at the same time? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could spend an afternoon at the stone bench outside our school someday and continue our grumpy chat together?
Take care, and until then.
Cordially,
Yan
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More about Winnie: http://www.yanwaiyin.com/
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