Video Art in Hong Kong: Organologic Sketches for a Dispersive History

To make sense of the history of video art of a place, such as Hong Kong, one must begin to allow apparently unrelated human purposes, courses of events, institutional histories, incidents and accidents, personal calling, as well as desires that precede and surround the popularization of a named practice, to shed light on this single medium and its players. This latter position embraces the wisdom of media archaeology, enriched by Bruno Latour’s call for the study of shared agencies between humans and artifacts integrated into the same framework, and finds wholesome integration in Bernard Stiegler’s view of organology. While contextual factors may have determined a lot of what happened, in most media history studies, we are not always ready to come face to face with the fact that the inner logic of a medium, especially how the tool itself affords practice, could have driven certain directions of development more than we have understood simply because we leave it out of our investigation. I shall open myself to consider as many of these issues as possible: tracking down institutional provisions, processes, artists and their facilitators, the disparate but abundant locations where video art activities were realized and made visible, and what has been left out, so as to generate a tentative portrait of video art in Hong Kong, in contrast with other regions.