Unmooring Hong Kong: Archipelagic Imagination in Law Yuk-mui's Song of the Exile

The multimedia and performative installation Song of the Exile [客途秋恨] was assembled and exhibited on a top-floor space in a factory building in Kwai Hing in 2022. The space leads up to the rooftop with the view of Kwai Chung container port, where ships come in and out and goods circulate fervently on a daily basis. It is a particularly apt choice of location for the work, as the port echoes the emphasis placed on the ship and the sea route as a transitory and connective space in the work. In Song of the Exile, Law continues to pursue her interest in Asiatic migration and displacement, which she had explored in previous works. Here she continues to address the phenomenon of displacement largely resulting from various forms of state and popular violence that arose in the context of Cold War politics in Asia. She does so by interlacing multiple trajectories across the Java Sea, the Straits of Malacca, the Seven Islands Sea, the Pacific Ocean, the South China Sea, and Victoria Harbour.

 

In this paper, I draw from Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking to analyze the ways through which Law approximated the traces left behind by migratory processes. She tactically collates warm data across archives, as well as proliferated, fragmented, and interrupted materials, as a way to gesture towards the possibility of unmooring Hong Kong from the margins of empires and reimagining it as an archipelagic entity, a nodal point enmeshed in a web of relations that is woven by the ocean liner. In this way, the work proposes a suggestive re-worlding of the port city. 

 

Physical encounter with Song of the Exile is bound to be fragmentary, even disorienting. As one steps into the exhibition space, it is unclear where one should start looking, or whether there is a starting point at all. Scattered around the space are several televisions, pieces of flowing white fabric serving as projection screens, artist books, LED screens, fluorescent lamps, and various found objects. Moving through the elements one by one, the viewer is able to slowly piece together the fragments: the majority of the materials pertain to the voyages and voyagers on the Tjiwangi, an ocean liner offering cruise-like services between Australia and the Far East in the 1950s and 60s.

 

Law’s research on the Tjiwangi began as she was preparing for the two-channel video work S. S. TJI, which was first exhibited in 2019 and reincorporated into Song of the Exile. During the archival research phase, Law discovered that the Dutch shipping company Royal Interocean Lines (RIL), which operated liners like the Tjiwangi between East and Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, Australia etc, had its headquarters in Hong Kong. In fact, the company gave Java Road in North Point its name because of the frequent services to and from Java, Indonesia. At first, Law considered centering the RIL in her work, but she ultimately decided against focusing on a European company operating in Asia and basing her work on a single corporate archive. Instead, she chose to center ordinary voyagers and sailors and their sojourning experiences, which necessitates an excavation of accounts about the journeys from disparate archives. The footages and images in S. S. TJI were drawn from RIL’s official publications, news program footages, a communist spy movie, and a personal video archive of Hong Kong owned by Michael Rogge. For the textual narrative, Law pieces together multifarious personal accounts by diasporic people hailing from Indonesia. 

 

This commitment to excavate vestiges from multiple archives of various types echoes Lisa Lowe’s call for reading across separate repositories, because state-run national and colonial archives are classified and categorized in such a way that discourages connections and convergences. In her study of the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora - Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora - Gayatri Gopinath discusses one of the ways to counter such hegemonic and pervasive archival principles, as deployed by the artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani. They collated a “warm database” on South Asian and Middle Eastern detainees in the United States by gleaning for “accidental ruptures” in government documents and by collecting data from “the realms of the sensorial and the affective” through alternative questionnaires. Such warm data stands “in opposition to the ‘cold hard facts’ elicited by official interrogations of the detainees and used to produce, discipline, and contain the ‘terrorist.’” Song of the Exile adopts a similar approach and likewise restores the “warm data” of migrant sociality on board the Tjiwangi and similar ships, where migrants and travelers of different origins, race, ethnicities, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds collide and interact with one another. 

 

What did this social space at sea look like, and how did these collisions and interactions take place? Law attempts to address these questions by piecing together “a lost sea route from the voyagers’ memories.” But what does it really mean to work with memories? In a sense, memory is a translation of lived experiences, that is, a translation in the Glissantian sense, as “an art of flight” and “a renunciation that accomplishes.” Glissant explains that any translation of poetry necessarily gives up “the greater part of its rhythm, its secret structures, its assonances, these accidents that are the chance and the permanence of writing.” In the process of translating lived experiences into memories, there is similarly always an act of renunciation of untranslatable shards that sink into the abyss of time. As the artist approaches these memories that surface through the crevices of the archives and reconfigures them into a work of art, another round of translation/transaction takes place, resulting in further losses. In this schematic, the artist-as-translator’s task is to acknowledge — even highlight — this inevitable loss. 

 

Law herself considers “memory not as facts, but as an abstract and fragmentary material: to understand memory as fragments is to acknowledge that loss is inevitable and the whole is not meant to be retrievable or ever attainable. This understanding is channeled into the work firstly by the multiplicity of artistic forms and narrative threads. Together, moving image, sound, texts, consumer-grade found objects, and improvised performances mark the interstices of those who once travelled along the sea route to, from, and via Hong Kong, including sailors, intellectuals, artists, refugees, students, even horses, from China, British Malaya, Indonesia, Australia, and the Soviet Union. Behind all of these figures looms the shadow of the artist as a contemporary Hong Kong citizen preparing to leave the city for good — the melancholy of the soon-to-depart is condensed into the silent explosion of illegal fireworks on screen. The footages were filmed from the artist’s home in Tseung Kwan O after she made the decision to leave. 

 

Another tactical move through which Law highlights the fragmentary nature of memory is to break apart and hollow out found materials. The script in S. S. TJI. at first seems like a recollection of a single individual, and it only becomes evident from the wall text and the credits that it is actually an assemblage of fragments extracted from multifarious texts. This tactic is also evident in Law’s use of the tune that lends its name to this work. Hak To Chau Hen, or Wayfarer's Autumn Lament, is a well-known naamyam tune that narrates the love story of a scholar and a courtesan who are separated by physical distance. Law silences the melody, and separates the tempo and the lyrics: the lyrics are displayed as scrolling LED text, whereas the hand of a percussionist playing the tempo is shown in a video projection. Only the sound of the tempo reverberates throughout the space. The artist sees this as a way to “break the sense of wholeness or coherence” and to stress on the unstable nature of naamyam which varies greatly every time it is performed. It also speaks to the malleability of memory, as it changes shape with every performative iteration.  

 

In the overall soundscape, the tempo of Hak To Chau Hen is interlaced with a metallic sound and an erhu rendition of Nostalgia [思鄉曲]. Originally written for the violin by Ma Si-cong in 1937, the song was later used by China National Radio as the opening score in all of their Taiwan-facing broadcasts. In an ironic turn of events, the composer of this tune that was appropriated for propagandistic purposes had to flee from China during the Cultural Revolution. The metallic sound, on the other hand, references “daa tit sau”, the procedure that hammers rust off ship parts in order to prepare them for repainting. Law invited Damon Lee, the artist-performer in this work who is also a seaman, to draw from his own memory of life at sea to imagine and recreate the sound. These three sonic layers ebb and flow, overlap with, and interrupt one another. By way of the multiplication of forms and narratives, fragmentation of found materials, and sonic interruption, Law creates a cacophonous assemblage that speaks to the hesitation, ambiguity, and sense of contingency arising from the process of translating lived experiences into an artwork about memory.

 

This cacophonous assemblage is combined with a performative dimension to create a work of “improvised cinema,” which is the overarching form that coheres disparate elements. This particular form is inspired by an image of a makeshift movie theater created by crews on board, one that Law stumbled upon in an RIL monthly staff magazine. That movie theater was once a creolizing space in which transculturation took place at sea; it has since disappeared, leaving behind a faint echo in the archive. “Translation,” writes Glissant, “the art of approximation and the gentle touch, is a way to get close to the trace.” I see Law’s improvised cinema as a careful approximation to the trace that is the movie theater and socio-cultural life on board more broadly, because it is shown to be a mixing of archival vestiges and fabulations, and is decidedly not a truthful representation of life at sea. The disappeared movie theater is translated into an affective configuration in which the viewer is compelled to imagine the horizontal and rhizomatic relationality between co-diasporics who cross paths in the oceans. Such are the “lateral axes of diaspora,” as termed by James Clifford, meaning “the decentered, partially overlapping networks of communication, travel, trade, and kinship” that “connect the several communities of a transnational ‘people’.” 

 

For Glissant, the trace is a powerful counter-force that rebels against the “strangulations of the system” and the “continental frameworks that assume synthesis, unity, and coherence.” The trace “opens onto these diffracted times that human communities today are multiplying among themselves, through conflicts and miracles. It is the violent wandering of the shared thought.” As a violent wandering, it opens up an archipelagic imagination of connectivities, ruptures, a form of relationality in which irreducible differences interact, collide, and coexist through time and space. In her essay on media geology and settler colonialism in Hokkaido, Yuriko Furuhata reminds us that archipelago can be a vertically constructed imperial imaginary, as in the case of the Japanese “island empire.” Yet it is also possible to think archipelagos horizontally.  

 

That Hong Kong as a port city situated within wider webs and networks is not at all a new concept in historical studies. Yet we seldom see an imagining of actual journeys, or the interactions and collisions within such journeys, in Hong Kong’s contemporary visual culture. I argue that the attention to rhizomatic relationality and lateral axes in Song of the Exile reflects the impetus to unmoor Hong Kong from the margins of the British and Chinese empires and to remap it onto an intricate archipelagic web in which the port city shares close ties with Southeast Asia. The act of unmooring means temporarily bracketing out vertical relationships between the metropole and the colony, the center and the periphery. It makes space for a consideration and imagination of minor-to-minor, margin-to-margin transnational and transcultural relationality, and opens up the possibility of connecting Hong Kong — as a nodal point in a maritime web of relations — to wider geographies. In Song of the Exile, there is a deflated beach ball/globe sitting on a low pedestal: it serves to remind us that dominant Eurocentric geography, as symbolized by normative representations of the globe, is both artificial and malleable. It can even be played with as a ludic object. This hegemonic geography must be challenged to make room for new geographical imaginaries — especially for thinking imaginatively about the worlding and re-worlding of Hong Kong. 

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​(2023)