Akeroyd Collection

Works

WangShui, From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances, 2019

In this single-channel video installation, we slowly approach the recognisable residential buildings of Hong Kong’s southside from the perspective of a front-facing drone camera. The distinguishing feature of these buildings is the gaping holes in the architecture; large geometric voids, where a number of flats could have been. Called ‘dragon gates’, these holes are said to be designed as passages for dragons to fly from the mountains to the sea, enabling the proper flow of energy between the natural and built environment. While we are placed in the dragon's position, making our way through the human architecture to the sea, we listen to the artist recount a number of personal reflections on the surroundings, their transactions with drone pilots, on myth, on the history of the persecution of Feng Shui practitioners, their own heritage and relationship to Asia as an Asian American. The words become increasingly confessional, and we are told that the personal is more political than ever. The drones fly through multiple dragons gates but on each pass, the camera cuts just at the threshold. We never fully transition, repeatedly suspended at the liminal zone between land and sea, between architecture and nature. Likewise, when told how Emperors would customize their mythological dragons as vehicles to help them transition to the afterworld, we cannot escape the possibility that we are on the artist's own journey of transition. In pausing at the liminal zone each time, we are being encouraged to resist binary distinctions at all. On the back of the dragon we ride, we are kept in a space of productive liminality, questioning gender, identity, nationality, political certainties, and our place in the world.

Mediumsingle-channel HD video
Duration13 minutes, looped
Editionof 3 + 2 APs