2017, Deep Water, 3D animated anaglyphic video, 7:23

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Battle ship Yamato flies shipwrecked at the bottom of the sea, dreams of an empire faded. Geological time intersects with human history—bursting forth from the ground, it moves around, scatters, floats, shatters, finds rest. A whale passes overhead. Schools of people appear as ghosts and walk right through me.

 

This work takes the form of a video and sound walk through the Sham Shui Po market area, in which its urban spaces have been digitally re-mapped to allow time to move in multiple directions and flow along the deep waters beneath concrete pavements that reveal unexpected histories of the area. Referencing both the concreted over stream that existed until the 1960’s on Nam Cheong Street and the harbor shoreline whose waves lapped along Pei Ho Street before land reclamation, the camera drifts through the streets, flickering between the past and the present following the currents of long lost waterways. Taking the Situationist slogan ‘Sous les pavés, la plage! (Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!) and drawing further back to the 19th century figure of the flanneur who strolled the boulevards of Paris observing the poetics of urban life, the camera becomes a virtual dandy whose aimless strolling is disturbed by unraveling traces of the past.