Curator´s Statement

Bit Street, a debut collaboration between Videotage and The New Art Fest, aims to explore how video works by millennial artists in Hong Kong and China redefine the notions of materiality and immateriality of space through the moving image. The curated works question how the production of fictional physical spaces rendered through digital technology can create alternative sensorial experiences.

Chen Pin Tao’s Baptizing “The Capitalist Pigs By The Clear Water Bay” creates a flat vector illustration of a park, which eventuates into an alien life form attacking the middle-class urban dwellers, expressed through technoerotic metaphors of excessive capitalism.

Lu Yang uses as iconography the heroic bodies in “The Great Adventure of Material World”. By creating an imagined future city with radical infrastructure, Yang allows viewers to navigate through a series of fight scenes aiming to secure a path toward a future world.

Suze Chan’s “What is it that makes the days different?” invokes a walking journey on the street, with a superimposed mirror above reflecting a gloved hand touching various products and a split screen portraying a group of pigeons eating on the ground, manifesting the profound uncanniness of a mind in the physical world. In “Arcifinious Faces Places and Space”s, Zhiwan Cheung shares with viewers a version of their own illusion. By montaging various footages of nature, the work reflects on the artist’s consciousness.

Bit Street begins with the idea of commissioning four artists to create a short video work for public screens in Lisbon. While these works will be showcased online in the midst of the pandemic, this project will explore how the artists’ imagined spaces will be perceived in a virtual setting and beyond.

Isaac Leung