Montage as Critical Strategy: Fragments, Networks, Theory

**This action-research is partly supported by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's Research Grant Council (Project No. CityU 11404614 "Where Else to Look," a published statement in a film festival catalogue that communicates my method of experimental, alternative image-making to a professioanl and general audience.
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[This essay is published bi-lingually in English and Korean. The e-version is published on 19 Sep 2017, after the print version on 14 July 2017.]
I have resisted the split and dichotomy of theory versus making (practice). Theory is making. The practice of theory takes different forms of situated engagement: the knowing subject is also the subject in action, whether she is writing, reading, or deploying any artistic media, in a concrete life-world, in a specific place of a specific moment. Simply because I have multiple subject positions – as a scholar, historian, artist, writer and educator – the domains of these positions, together with modes of enquiry that come with each of them, flow into each other to shape my daily practice. My engagement with the world is necessarily multiple. Theory does not prescribe what I do; but theory leads me to arrive at a certain position and moment of artistic action. Theory emerges in the process of action. I arrive at the theory I make as I arrive at the end of an artistic journey.
Over the years, I have developed a method to create video works that are based on found-footage or video diaries in my own archive. Collecting sights and sounds in a certain existential mindset, and gaining fresh understanding of these documents much later like a researcher, form the rudiments of my experimental documentary position which maps a double “I” at work. My collecting activities are highly intuitive, much like Surrealist automatism, and yet inevitably shaped by my education and life experiences, whereas the formation of image/sound discourses from video fragments is an important process of discovery and critical intervention. And this is also where my historiographic intention comes in.
Most of my creative works have a visual, auto-ethnographic dimension: through personal visual diaries I observe culture and history as concrete lived experiences and entrenched moments of the everyday. One way or another, my projects aim to reconstruct a lost history of Hong Kong as it resides largely in surviving sight-and-sound and print fragments. The sights and sounds of archival footage preserve something of lived experience, even when it cannot be reduced to neat stories with neat conclusions. The power of found-footage-based, collage-style experimental documentary lies in this direction. Voice Seen, Image Heard (EXiS 2010) and Non-place, Other Space (EXiS 2009) both belong to this category.