Wong Pak Hang
Site Seeing
Videotage | To Kwa Wan
CurrentVideo
CRT televisions create images by rapidly illuminating lines of phosphors, using the persistence of vision to transform these lights into moving images. Cameras also account for the human eye, capturing action in front of the lens, frame by frame, and then connecting them into continuous sequences. Both technologies are designed to complement the human visual system, yet without an observer, they are reduced to repetitive stills and brief flashes of light. In moving images, collaboration between the human and the machine is essential for complete information transmission; only through ‘seeing’ can one ‘be seen.’
The commissioned project, Site Seeing by Hong Kong-based artist Wong Pak Hang, juxtaposes machine perspectives with human vision, exploring conscious and unconscious acts of filming and viewing. Within Videotage’s exhibition space, the artist reconnects cameras and televisions accumulated by the organisation over the years to create a field of machine interaction. Viewers wander between low-resolution lenses and colour-distorted screens, interfering with wireless signals while becoming objects of observation and merging into the image signals. The interplay between virtual and real, delay and immediacy, and engagement and feedback flows continuously along the cables, merging space, media devices, and viewers into a site-specific sensory experience.
Site Seeing is the inaugural chapter of Videotage’s media archaeology project, which invites the artist to intervene in the organisation’s exhibition space and media equipment collection. In addition to the exhibition, Wong Pak Hang will extend these discussions through live performances and performance lectures in collaboration with Jonathan Kan, Ian Tang and Hou Lam Tsui.
- Artists
- Wong Pak Hang
- Curators
- Johnny Au, Doris Poon
- Date
- Nov 23, 2024 – Jan 5, 2025
- Venue
- Videotage
- Address
- Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong