Floating Drifting Mobile Dwelling: Mobility as Sensibility in Jolene Mok's Art Practice

​It was in a work-related scenario that I first heard of Jolene Mok years ago. I learnt that since 2011, around the time when started her MFA at Duke University, she has been going from residency to residency and rarely spends an extended period of time in her hometown Hong Kong or elsewhere. In the years to follow, I came across Jolene’s works in Hong Kong only a couple of times. She was hardly ever in town, did not “network” much here, and perhaps mainly for this reason has not exhibited here as often as many of her peers. The works that I saw were all created in various locations abroad, showing scenes from those locales, which, given her background, made so much sense to me at the time that I hardly gave it any thought. 

 

It was at the start of this collaboration in 2021 when I learnt that Jolene has in fact continued this endless sojourning through residency programs in various countries for over a decade. Only then did it occur to me how very remarkable - almost unimaginable for me personally - it is that someone could drift around for so many years, without ever feeling exhausted to the point of succumbing to the desire to take root. Mobility, then, is the defining characteristic of Jolene’s mode of being in the world, and it has shaped her works through the years. This essay therefore considers what it means to think of mobility as the core of Jolene’s practice, and attempts to unpack the implications of this. Following sociologist John Urry, I think of mobility as a “structure of feeling” that leads to a relational understanding and addressing of things, places, ideas, peoples, and objects, and ask how this structure of feeling manifests and unfolds in some of Jolene’s works. I consider how the crossing of distances plays an important part in Jolene’s art practice on various levels, and contextualise her works in the traditions of landscape art and ethnography in order to elucidate the distinctive mobility-as-sensibility in a transbordering cosmopolitan subject. Yet what are we talking about when we talk about mobility? Before delving into Jolene’s art practice, I take a detour and think more generally about mobility for a start.

 

 

Part 1: Forms of mobilities

 

As soon as I started pondering mobility in relation to the artist, a wealth of imagery began popping up: there are the foundational religious wanderers Jesus Christ and Buddha, succeeded by itinerant preachers and missionaries; mythical figures like Odysseus; literary figures like Matsuo Basho; explorers such as Marco Polo and Zheng He, who left their lasting mark on the history of crossing and cultural exchange. There are the gypsies of course (Henri Rousseau’s sleeping gypsy and Garcia Marquez’s Melquiades immediately come to mind); travelling circuses and performers, sailors, itinerant soldiers, terrorists, cruise-ship enthusiasts, international students, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, refugees, backpackers, asylum seekers, commuters, slaves, sports stars, prostitutes, digital nomads… There is even the kitschy image of dandelion pappus floating in the air, symbolising movement, rootlessness, and fateful wandering. Some of these figures of mobility became key concepts in contemporary theory: for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, the nomads signify an externality to the state and characterise societies of deterritorialisation, constituted by lines of flight. Zygmunt Bauman, on the other hand, theorises the vagabond and the tourist: the former is a pilgrim without a destination, a nomad without an itinerary, while the latter “pays for their freedom, their right to disregard native concerns and feelings, the right to spin their own web of meanings.” As the list seems to expand endlessly, two things began to dawn on me: firstly, there are many types of mobilities that are very much uneven and unequal; secondly, the mobile, ambulatory way of life only seems highly unusual from my semi-sedentarist point of view, when in fact it has been a pattern of human’s lived experience for centuries. 

 

Regarding the first point, Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, distinguishes between various socio-spatial patterns of mobility, including nomadism, wandering, a royal tour of the kingdom, diasporic travel, the Court’s travel, migration, and adventure and leisure travel. We may add many more patterns to this list from our vantage point: slavery, indentured labour, human trafficking, digital nomadism, asylum seeking… again, the list can go on and on, but one thing is clear even from an incomplete list: mobility does not equate freedom as there are many forms of forced mobilities. At the same time, forms of mobilities cannot be fully understood without also considering forms of immobilities, as these are often interconnected phenomena: as Subir Rana points out, mobility is a “relational concept”, and “one’s mobility may be another’s immobility”. While it may be true that there is “an entirely new breed of people, a transcontinental tribe of wanderers…the transit loungers, forever heading to the departure gate,” the access to membership of this new “tribe” is largely determined by one’s race, class, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, physical capabilities, educational access and other factors. Those who are unmarked in every sense are also those who possess the most mobility capital, meaning one’s power to be mobile and to cultivate global networks. For instance, the so-called digital nomad is most likely to be white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, university-educated, with good access to technological products and a non-manual job that allows him to work remotely. Indrajit Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan writer, describes it succinctly: “the digital nomad orders a coffee. The brown man serves it. Neither can see it, but the waiter is serving coffee through the bars of a cage. The brown man is chained to the land. He has the passport of a shithole country and is universally acknowledged as scum. He himself acknowledges this. As it was in colonial days, the white man remains his superior.” Regarding the second point, mobility has long played a vital role in the formation of civilisation, trade, and state formation through nomads and gypsies. Anthropologist James Clifford emphasises on the “long-established and complex” nature of the processes of human movement and encounter. Mobility-as-practice has without a doubt existed for a long time, but its reach and impact broadened dramatically with the onset of modernity. With its connection to modernity, technology, and progress, the term mobile is mostly a positive category, so much so that a Thomas Cook brochure dated 1854 proclaims thus: “to remain stationary in these times of change, when all the world is on the move, would be a crime. Hurrah for the Trip - the cheap, cheap Trip.” 

 

In Hong Kong’s context, the way of life adopted by Jolene appears especially uncommon. Here the cult of sedentarism manifests itself as a valorisation of property ownership in and of itself, as it has long been considered as something of a rite of passage that everybody theoretically goes through as they hit a certain age. An itinerant life therefore presents itself as an absolute alterity in this value system, and as such easily becomes idealised, fetishised, and romanticised in narratives of “wandering” (流浪) and “running away” (出走). Sedentarist cultures tend to propagate a bifurcated view of mobile life, either idealised as a practice of freedom as discussed above (the nomad seen as the antithesis of the salary worker in a capitalist economy), or feared and suspected as a destabilising force (the vagabond seen as a criminal that threatens to upset the stability of sedentary societies). There is a sense of mobile as a mob, which is seen as “disorderly precisely because it is mobile, not fully fixed within boundaries and therefore needs to be tracked and socially regulated.” Given what has been summarised in this section, I am particularly guarded against uncritically subscribing to the over-romanticised notion of the modern nomad and simplistically characterising Jolene as such. Instead, Jolene’s mobility must be understood in its specificity, and as conditional upon a range of factors. During an interview in July 2022, she shared her anxiety about crossing the Europe-UK border for the first time after Brexit, as a Hong Kong person with a British passport, and this conditional freedom predicated on a history of subjugation is the prerequisite for the form of mobility experienced by a postcolonial subject. 

 

 

Part 2: Dwelling-in-motion 

 

In 2012, Jolene joined a scientific expedition which explored deep-sea ecosystems of the Barbados accretionary wedge. Together with a team of marine biologists, she boarded R/V Atlantis and stayed on the vessel for a week, collecting visual materials in that time, and later editing them into the three-channel work Shipboard Romance (2013). The work shows the vessel in a series of static shots placed at different angles. Nobody shows up. Nothing happens. The silence is overwhelming - we cannot even hear the sound of waves breaking. There is just this vessel moving in the open sea. Although most of the structures and equipments of the vessel remain unfamiliar to most viewers, the whole work is devoid of information about the ship, the crew, or the expedition; the omission is intentional. With the lens bobbing up and down, the main thing that is being relayed - not represented - is the mild sense of nausea and disorientation, the sensuous experience of being in constant motion on a ship, being at sea, being away from land, being somewhere and nowhere at once. 

 

Moreover, by fixating on the mundane features of this temporary space of dwelling, Jolene manages to convey the sense of temporality that imbues life at sea: as one stares endlessly at the vessel, at the sky, at the waves carrying the ship, time seemingly comes to a standstill. Such a work highlights the heightened sensitivity towards movement in a deterritorialised subject - someone who has unplugged herself from a territory and becomes a scattered being. Movement is here understood not merely as a transfer between physical spaces, across geographical borders, via air, sea, or roads, but most importantly as a transportation across temporalities and sensibilities, forms of mediation and ways of knowing, and more. An early work by Jolene, Shipboard Romance foretells her incessant journey in the following decade, foregrounds movement and mobility which came to circumscribe her practice, and succinctly encapsulates a mode of being in the world which I term “dwelling-in-motion”. 

 

Here a key reference is Heidegger’s understanding of dwelling as being. Writing in the wake of the housing shortage after World War II, one of Heidegger’s central concerns in “Building dwelling thinking” was the relation between building and dwelling. Contrary to a conception of dwelling which is only attained by means of building, I borrow from John Urry’s interpretation of Heidegger which emphasises on dwelling as a staying with things which are bodily ready-to-hand. “To speak of men is to speak of those who already dwell through moving through space… To dwell is always to be moving and sensing, both within and beyond.” Dwelling-in-motion does not require a habitual physical space as a prerequisite, rather it is sensing while moving, and involves an exploration of one’s own relation with the physical and social aspects of the transitory space of dwelling which, as we have seen in Shipboard Romance, is not necessarily an architectural space. Dwelling-in-motion means being in a multitude of trajectories, immersing in and experiencing each point as we float through them. “Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilising them.”

 

So how does this particular state of being in the world translate into a specific sensibility, and how does this sensibility manifest in Jolene’s works? For one thing, there is a sense of distance that imbues both her practice and her works, both practically and conceptually. There is of course the need to traverse physical distance at the start of each creative episode: since 2011, she has stayed in Haukijarvi, the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, Beaufort, Svalbard, Skagaströnd, Incheon, Siglufjörður, Ólafsfjörður, Mänttä, Nagano, Tranås, Opland, Avilés, Cavan, Recess, Bolus Head, Aomori, and Solf. There is a lot of movement across national borders, made relatively easy by her British citizenship (a colonial legacy of British Hong Kong). And then there is a highly noticeable distance, or dissonance, between the artist and her works: when I mentioned this in an interview, she immediately responded by saying she had heard this comment multiple times. Many people have been surprised by her outgoing and talkative personality after viewing her very quiet and subtle works. The artist thinks that the process of artmaking allows her to calm down and gives her headroom to understand the world around her. In other words, the impersonal approach to her subject allows her the necessary distance to observe and think. 

 

As a foreigner in all of these places - none of which is metropolitan, some extremely remote and sparsely populated - she would experience her own foreignness in the form of linguistic and cultural difference/distance. In a way this distance is intentionally cultivated: Jolene describes herself as a “city girl from head to toe”, with no survival skills whatsoever outside the city, yet she really wants to “see something different” in places that are “the direct opposite of Hong Kong”, in terms of population density, landscape, atmosphere etc, and to disentangle herself from her identity as a city dweller from a highly dense, extremely fast-paced metropolis. Without a well-established framework or methodology by which she engages with different places, she would typically “go with the flow”, that is, with what each residency offers her. It is possible however to speak of two recurring tactics in her creative practice: engagement with locals, and a “search for landscapes or places that are totally mundane and unremarkable to locals, observe them with a fresh pair of eyes, and perhaps offer a new angle for locals to take a fresh look at their own town through her works.” Both could be considered methods to negotiate her distance to places and their peoples. After collecting visual materials, Jolene relies on the temporal, epistemological, and medial distance that separates her and the subject to make the work: “when something captivates me, I would always shoot first. I’m used to collaborating with my camera, as I have profound trust in that it will capture something I miss with my own eyes. When I go back and look at the footage, I know that there will always be things I didn’t see on the spot.” Mediated seeing as a key work procedure allows her to further develop the necessary distance from her subject.

 

Part 3: (Non-)landscape and the outsider as beholder

 

Since the early days of Jolene’s artistic career, she has compiled a range of works with a visual kinship to western landscape art. These are video works comprised mostly of wide and static shots of natural and built environments, filmed at a distance from the subject. Indeed, it is appropriate to describe “landscape” as a prominent genre in Jolene’s body of work, and in this section I will discuss these works in the context of landscape art. Although the artist does not work explicitly within any landscape tradition, it is still worth following W. J. T. Mitchell in asking what landscape does (rather than what it is or means) in order to articulate what I mean by (non-) landscape and tease out that which is distinctive about it in Jolene’s practice. 

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For a start, it is crucial to note that landscape does not simply denote perception or representation of neutral/natural objects; instead it must be considered as a cultural practice and an instrument of cultural power. This power mainly lies in its ability and tendency to naturalise “cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable.” With this in mind, it is furthermore important to note that landscape painting reached the pinnacle of its popularity at the height of European Imperialism. Mitchell argues that landscape is the “dreamwork” of imperialism, a “particular historical formation” that is “integrally connected with imperialism,” while its representation is “intimately bound up with the discourses of imperialism.” In his recent book Visions of Nature, Jarrod Hore also posits that landscape photography in the Tasman World and the American West was crucial as a “declaration of settler territoriality”. It aided and reinforced settler occupation, and simultaneously mythologised settler’s belonging to the colonial earth and naturalised Indigenous dispossession of land in those parts of the world. 

 

The nineteenth century was of course a time when the historical forces of imperialism, modernisation, and nationalism converged, and landscape art had a key role to play in relation to all of these forces. In particular, landscape art was a crucial form of cultural expression in the formation of national identity, which is generally associated with a notion of territoriality. Xiaojing Wen and Paul White argue that artistic depictions of the physical and cultural landscapes of a state’s territory play a significant role in the creation and perpetuation of cultural and national identities. Citing the example of Constable, Wen and White note that his art was famous for not being influenced by the quality of light elsewhere because Constable never travelled outside of England. His work was contrasted with an “other” elsewhere, reflecting the distinctiveness of the English countryside, and this distinctiveness or national character is convincingly authentic precisely because the artist is safe from contamination by the other. Outside of Europe, landscape was also effectively mobilised to fuel nationalistic sentiments in Meiji Japan, where writers such as Shiga Shigetaka argues for the national character of natural scenery such as volcanic rock and the “Japanese Alps”, and Karatani Kojin points out that this idea was hugely popular during the upsurge of Japanese nationalism around the time of the First Sino-Japanese War.

 

Is it at all possible to imagine a different lineage of landscape representation that is completely free from such historical baggage? Here I take the video installation Let us now praise forest (2018) as an example: Jolene started the creative process by shooting the same spot of the forest at her residency in Aomori almost everyday, in both digital and film. She then developed her film photography and cut them up into strips, splicing together these photographic strips and the digital footage and remixing them into a single work of moving image that is at once harmonious and blatantly dissonant. At times the movement in the video seems to mimic the shifting light and shade in nature. The viewer might catch the strips morphing into a single, coherent image of a forest, or into a completely glitched up version that makes no sense. Landscape art, regardless of medium or sub-genre, relies on the representation of nature as a coherent whole for it to constitute an object of desire and for the territorialised subject to cultivate a sense of belonging and identification. By highlighting the put-together-ness of natural scenery, and by juxtaposing and differentiating various space-times in one image, this work runs counter to the standard operation of naturalising cultural constructions in landscape art. Here nature fails to pose as a timeless ideal; rather it is shown to be a view experienced, captured, cut up, and reconstructed by the artist who was attracted to the allure of the view as a foreigner in the first place. As such, it refuses to be a vessel that conveys and perpetuates colonial and nationalist territoriality and temporality, and reimagines a location as moving through time, as an itinerary, a contact zone, a site of encounter and translation - for this reason I am calling it “non-landscape”. 

 

One of the creative tactics that is recurrent in many of Jolene’s non-landscape works is the use of dramatic editing to achieve a humorous effect. For instance, in TETRISEA (2006), she mashed up a beach scene into Tetriminos and created a sequence that seems to be a game of increasingly fast, and therefore increasingly ridiculous, Tetris. For a later work, life would be tragic if it weren’t funny (2014), she shot what looks like a snow-filled backyard and two neighbouring houses at different times on different days. The normally tranquil and mundane scene is dramatised by the extremely fast editing, through which the artist achieves an effect of humorous absurdity with visual elements as simple as snow and a flock of birds. The artist remixes well-established codes of the sublime, the mundane, and the humorous to create “something which does not and will not let itself be coded,” to borrow the words of Deleuze in his discussion of Nietzsche. Deleuze defines nomadic thought as an artistic experimentation in style that has political relevance, precisely because of its escaping of codes, and this mixing of codes marks “the beginning of the nomadic adventure.” Jolene’s non-landscape works can be described as nomadic by virtue of its humorous quality derived from the mixing of codes (“you cannot but laugh when you mix up the codes” and this laughter always “harks back to the external movement of humours and ironies”), and also of its relation to the “outside”. Because they are views seen and reordered by Jolene the outsider-cum-beholder, they are images that are always already contaminated by the influences of the “other”. As such, they stand as the antithesis of “proper” landscape (e.g. Constable’s paintings), which poses as an instance when the territorialised subject looks back at his own culture in search of a distinctiveness that serves to secure a place for him in the world. In stark contrast to the western landscape tradition that is enmeshed in ideas such as nationalism, statism, sedentarism, territoriality, cultural purity, Jolene’s works evoke the Chinese word for landscape - “風景”, literally meaning “wind-view”, a word that is palpably fleeting, elusive, unrooted, unpredictable, deterritorialised, constantly flowing, and anti-essentialist, for no one has ever imagined there to be a pure breed of wind. 

 

Part 4: Towards a new ethnography

 

In her discussion of ethnography as translation, Rey Chow proclaims that “a new ethnography is possible only when we turn our attention to the subjective origins of ethnography as it is practiced by those who were previously ethnographised…” In Chow’s account, the ethnographised subject is marked by a visuality she termed “to-be-looked-at-ness”. As a remnant of a memory of past objecthood, it is impressed upon the way of looking of the viewed-object-turned-viewing-subject. In the final section of the essay, I discuss the implication of this inverted gaze in Jolene’s approach in her “ethnographic” works, taking Shop Watching (Fukuoka, 2015) as an example, and think about how it enabled her to reformulate ethnography. 

 

In Shop Watching, the starting point of the work was a very simple observation: during a visit to a shopping arcade in Fukuoka, Jolene noticed that there were “two stores side by side, both of them selling only hats. It is so bizarre to me that they can both survive and sustain their business, so I decided I wanted to film them.” The final work ended up showing many different stores in the arcade that sell hats, clothes, embroidery, guns, lanterns, flowers, cigarettes, cotton products, paper products, suits, and it is so structured that the social fabric of a tight-knit community of shop-owning families emerges, as it is revealed at the end that the narrator is actually the son of a shop owner. The segment “Shops 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10” in particular shows different shop owners engaging in similar activities - reading the newspaper, tidying the shop, packing products, dealing with customer orders - in their separate spaces around the same time (the phrase “ちょうど同じ時間” appeared several times). The synchronicity of the habitual actions links the shops and their owners together to form a single chronotope, a particular time-space where the spatio-temporality of the post-war moment (encapsulated by the slightly anachronistic architecture of the shopping arcade) infiltrates the postmodern present. 

 

“In these works, I often look for certain kinds of native/local voices who could help me articulate my most direct observations (mostly cultural shocks) in the clearest possible way,” explains Jolene. The psychological distance between her and each “foreign” place is epitomised by these cultural shocks, which led her to notice and capture that which is strange to her in the locale, thereby playing up her status as a literal “étranger”. That she is able to see strangeness in the quotidian is precisely due to the fact that she is new to the locale and is temporarily inhabiting these places of no memory to her. 

 

Obviously, the classical (western) ethnographer similarly inhabits and observes places of no memory, but in their material collection, documentation and analysis, there is always a pretence of objectivity, an epistemological insertion that renders the lack of memory invisible and inconsequential. In Jolene’s “new ethnography”, the subjective nature of her observation is always palpable. The video has a balanced structure and lays out a temporal pattern described above, yet there is also a degree of arbitrariness detectable in the selection and sequencing of shops and activities. At no point does the video pretend to be an objective or scientific study of the shop owners of Fukuoka. The lack of memory in the new ethnographer that is highlighted by this presentation also differentiates such a work from national cinema, which had been characterised by Thomas Elsaesser (in the case of New German cinema) as “an attempt to gather, record, and report the images, sounds and stories - including those that the cinema itself produced - which make up the memory of a generation, a nation and a culture.” It is also worth noting that national cinema and classical ethnography are merely two sides of one coin, the gaze on oneself and on the other originates from the same stable and territorialised subject that seeks, consciously or not, to advance national interests. 

 

This “new ethnography” does not attempt to offer an explanation for the strangeness of the “natives” (a position that the new ethnographer once occupied), and although Jolene uses the term “cultural shock”, nothing is ever shown in a dramatic or sensational way in her works. Rather there is almost always an exaggerated matter-of-fact-ness that renders these shocks largely imperceptible. I propose that this is a way of showing the shifting distance between the artist and the locale as the residency and the creative process progresses, and as the locale moves towards becoming-dwelling. The difference-as-distance is highlighted (by the selection of “strange” subjects) while being negotiated, that is, as the artist grows more familiar with a place and its people. Instead of reinforcing the ethnographer and the natives as two fixed and impermeable categories, this strategy of representation makes room for the process of familiarisation and the accumulation of memories, and for the divide between categories to break down. In this way, “this reformulation of ethnography destroys the operational premises - of a world divided in the form of us and them, of viewing subject and viewed object - of classical anthropology,” and instead partakes in cultural translation in the Benjaminian sense of the word. This kind of translation is an anti-ethnocentric process in which the “native” should let the foreign affect, or infect, itself, and vice versa; it doesn’t “reduce the other to the terms of that self”, but is rather “a movement out towards the other.”

 

The non-landscape and ethnographic works of Jolene put forward a radically different imagining of dwelling, one that is characterised by a constant negotiation of distance through moving, sensing, and making. From the point of view of a foreigner, she highlights and negotiates what is foreign to her in various locales and communities, thereby (perhaps inadvertently) foregrounding the fact that foreignness is relational. This statement may appear self-evident, yet in many parts of the world today, the degree of assimilation is still a form of measurement of any given person’s worth, and a display of foreignness often enough cause for exclusion, ridicule, and even violence. Jolene’s practice could thus be understood as a force of movement and contamination that counters sedentarism, ethnocentrism, territoriality, stasis, purity, and homogenous time and space, and as a proposition of a new form of relationality to the world, one that imagines boundaries to be fluid, distances and differences to be surmountable, and subjectivity and culture to be constantly morphing and permeable. It constitutes a form of mobility that makes all borders appear somewhat ridiculous. 

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​(2022)