This panel explores Tai Kwun Contemporary's current exhibition Performing Society: The Violence of Gender from a Hong Kong perspective. How do binary structures of gender and stereotypical norms resonate in Hong Kong? How do we negotiate symbolic, cultural and physical boundaries in Hong Kong, with shifting and competing gender binaries? This panel explores these issues with a professor, a filmmaker and artists who will comment on and critique the exhibition as it relates to the Hong Kong metropolis.
Speakers: Prof. Eva Kit-wah Man, Jaffa Lam, Rita Hui, Celia Ko
Moderator: Michelle Wong
With a brief introduction by Tai Kwun Contemporary's Education and Public Programs Curator, Melissa Lee
The panel will be conducted primarily in Cantonese with simultaneous translation to English available.
Prof. Eva Kit-wah Man
Prof. Eva Man is currently the Director of Film Academy and Chair Professor in Humanities of Hong Kong Baptist University. She publishes widely in comparative aesthetics, comparative philosophy, woman studies, feminist philosophy, cultural studies, art and cultural criticism. She was a Fulbright scholar conducted research at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was named AMUW Endowed Woman Chair Professor of the 100th Anniversary of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2009. She contributes public services to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong Museums Advisory Committee and Hong Kong Public Libraries and other committees for LCSD and Home Affairs Bureau of HKSAR, and Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Arts and Cultural Heritage projects.
Jaffa Lam
Lam Laam, Jaffa received her BFA, MFA and Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
She is a sculptor specialising in large-scale site-specific works of mixed-media sculptures and installations, which are made with recycled materials such as crate wood, old furniture and umbrella fabric. In the last 15 years, she has been involved in many public art and community projects in Hong Kong and overseas. Her works often explore issues related to local culture, history, society and current affairs. Her entire oeuvre is imbued with the atmosphere of a dreamlike scenery, seemingly like an alternative asylum/heaven for the contemporary audience.
Apart from solo exhibitions, Lam has been invited to take part in many local and international shows, as well as artist residency programmes in Japan, Kenya, Taiwan, Bangladesh, China, United States, France and Canada, etc. In 2006, she was awarded the Asian Cultural Council's Desiree and Hans Michael Jebsen Fellowship. In 2017, she received an award from the Secretary for Home Affairs' Commendation Scheme.
In 2009, she started a community project in Hong Kong entitled “Micro Economy”. At the invitation of Hong Kong Arts Centre, Jaffa staged the exhibition: Jaffa Lam Laam Collaborative: Weaver in order to highlight this project. It has represented Hong Kong to show in Japan's Setouchi Triennale 2013, Taiwan’s Hong Kong Week 2015, German’s “China 8” 2015, Utopias/Heterotopia Wuzhen International Contemporary Art Exhibition 2016, Lyon Lumieres 2018, and she has been invited as a collaborator to show in Manifesta 12” The European Nomadic Biennial.
Rita Hui
Rita Hui graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Art with a Diploma course in Film & TV in 1994. In 1996, she finished the study of Advance Diploma in Film & TV (Major in Editing) and Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Department of Film & TV in the Academy. As a young talented director, her work Ah Ming gained wide attention and won the Distinguished Award of the Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Award in 1996. In 1998 her work She makes me wanna to die and Invisible City (Wall) all won the Silver Award in drama category and other category in the Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Award. Also, her work Alice in the Wonderland was shown in Hong Kong Arts Center at the programme Independent Yours. In 2001, she tried for the first time to work in theatre, with Tango of Water Sleeves and Beautiful Project and her video work Chionanthus Retusus. Her first video installation XX was shown in Macau Old Ladies House of “Wo…man” Feminine Art. 2004, she finished her new work IdoLetHerMyHeadHave. In 2005 and 2006, she produced Red Ridding Hood and RED. The later one is her RMIT’s master program final project. In 2007, she established and launched Rabbit Travelogue. In 2008, she finished her first featured film with ADC funding, Dead Slowly and it was shown in “PIFF 2009’s New Current” section and HKAIFF. In 2013, her second feature film Keening Woman was officially selected in “A Window of Asia” in the Busan International Film Festival. The third feature film Pseudo Secular was selected as the opening film of the South Taiwan Film Festival and selected in “Wave” at the Torino Film Festival 2016.
Celia Ko
Celia Ko, is a well-known artist and art educator who exhibited in both Hong Kong and overseas. She received formal fine art training in Southern California with extensive knowledge in drawing, painting, print-making and art history. While she considers herself primarily an oil painter of the figurative and portraits, she adopts installation, mix-media, 3D objects and photography for her conceptual creations which constitute her reoccurring theme of autobiographic quest of identity. Her work demonstrates her diverse yet intense interests and considerations in painting the perceived and the reconstruction of memory.
Ko worked with the most influential multi-cultural/community mural organization SPARC in Los Angeles after her graduation and co-created her mural with A. Moctezuma in Long Beach (USA). She brought her Southern California mural knowledge to Hong Kong at the time working with Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Housing Authority, Hong Kong Youth Art Festival, Hong Kong Education Bureau, etc., training both teachers and students.
Ko is a recipient of the Freeman Foundation Fellowship (USA). Her work is collected by Hong Kong Museum of Art and private collectors both locally and in overseas. She is a visiting lecturer at various art institutes including Hong Kong Baptist University, HKU SPACE, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (HK), SCAD, etc.
Michelle Wong
Michelle Wong is an AAA researcher based in Hong Kong, where her research focuses on histories of exchange and circulation through exhibitions and periodicals. She leads the Ha Bik Chuen archive project, which catalogues and researches the collection of the late Hong Kong-based artist, Ha Bik Chuen, whose documentation of over 1,500 exhibitions in Hong Kong and elsewhere from the 1960s-2009 provides precious rare archival material for the development of art history in Hong Kong and the region. Other AAA projects include the undergraduate course developed in collaboration with Fine Arts Department, The University of Hong Kong, and “London, Asia”, with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She was Assistant Curator of the 11th Edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016), and she is part of the collective project “Sightlines” with six other arts practitioners. Her writing has been published in Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945–1990 (2018) and Oncurating. She is a 2019 Pernod Ricard fellow at Villa Vassilieff & Bétonsalon, Paris.
