Translating visual archives: on the making of the new through three cases of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This study attempts to provide an original perspective to deciphering the mechanism of cultural production, the change in value hierarchies and the making of public space through the lens of art and visual archives in contemporary Hong Kong. The three cases of visual archives in question, intentionally or not, have three different Chinese translations of the English term ‘archive’: Asia Art Archive (wenxian 文獻), ‘Archive of the People’ (dang’an 檔案), and Umbrella Movement Visual Archive (kucun 庫存). The use of each translation literally and symbolically indicates the difference, tension, and diversity of the archive discourses in their specific context. In this vein, this study rethinks the art archive in relation to the idea of ‘the new’.

KEYWORDS:

• Art archive
• translation
• visual activism
• the new
• Hong Kong art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Pan Lu is assistant professor at the Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She held visiting positions at Technical University of Berlin (2008 and 2009), Harvard-Yenching Institute (2011–2012), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2016), and Center for Art and Urbanistics (Z/KU), Berlin (2016). Pan is the author of In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016) and Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol: Intellect, 2015). Her film Traces of Invisible City (co-directed with Bo Wang) was shown at DMZ Documentary Film Festival, South Korea and Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Notes

1. See the entry about the translation of Ma Duanlin’s Wenxian Tongkao, in Chinese History: A New Manual (Wilkinson 2012, 52–53).

2. The paragraph that mentioned the word ‘dang’an’ described the linguistic transformation of dang’an and dangzi from the literal meaning of wooden objects to a metonymical meaning of archive and records. Yang Bin compared a similar transformation from the cases of Han culture, where ‘jian’ and ‘bian’ are used to refer to the documents even though the real materiality had changed to paper. See Liubian jilüe, volume 3, 45.

3. In my interview with Claire Hsu, she described how the copyright transfer of the book from Hanart TZ Gallery, the original publisher, has happened with the help of Johnson Chang Tsong-zung (interview on 12 October 2016).

4. Interview with Claire Hsu.

5. See Wilkinson (2012, 647).

6. Du (2008).

7. See more on ‘Asia Art Archive’ (AAA) website: http://www.aaa.org.hk/About/Overview.

8. See more in Waung (2011, 16).

9. See Lee’s ‘Open Archives Initiative’ under ‘Archive of the People’, ‘A Meeting Man (Simon Chu Interview)’, single-channel video, 15 min 44 s, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjNMTK2iTx4, accessed on 6 March 2016.

10. See more on ‘Archive of the People’ 人人檔案website: http://www.archiveofthepeople.com/.

11. More sub-projects and descriptions see Lee. The History of Riot, http://www.archiveofthepeople.com/#!thehistoryofriot/c262, accessed on 6 March 2016.

12. Famously postulated in Ackbar Abbas’ seminal book on ‘disappearance’ in Hong Kong cinema, architecture, photography, and literature. See more in Abbas (1997).

13. Additional details and the last episode – an interview video with former PRO direct Simon Chu Fok Keung are provided in Open Archives Initiative http://www.archiveofthepeople.com/#!openarchivesinitiative/ck0q.

14. Interview with Sampson Wong Yu-hin, 14 August 2017.