Category: Works

2023, Digital Writing

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This work is inspired by Yip Yuk Yiu’s work False Words. Yip Yuk Yiu was my professor at the School of Creative Media. In that work, he created a computer program to continuously reconstruct Liu Xiaobo’s famous quote, “I have no enemies(我沒有敵人)”. The program repeatedly prints the result on a screen, layer by layer. Slowly, the other characters became fully colored blocks, and only the character 人(human) stood out to be recognizable. But in the end, it is still gradually buried by the words that are constantly printed on top of it.

The act of writing over and over on top of the text produces huge tension. It symbolizes an extreme obsession but still gives the audience plenty of room to imagine where the obsession comes from—whether it’s because someone doesn’t want to forget, or because of some strong emotions. That’s why I love this way of presentation.

In this work, I made the computer program to continuously transcribe part of the poem by Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, Children of the Age. The famous Hong Kong indie band My Little Airport read part of this poem at their 2021 concert as a response to the new normal in Hong Kong after the social movement in 2019 and the epidemic in 2020. After countless repetitions, the machine became tired, and typos and mistakes gradually appeared in the written content. In the end, it seemed to lose its mind totally and began to write nonsense. In the process, the word “political” emerges from the repeated letters, showing the quantitative characteristic of the text, then gradually gets buried under the random tokens.

I named the work 流水落花 Floating Petals. 流水落花(floating petals on flowing water) is a Chinese saying, first written by Li Yu, in his verse “流水落花歸去也，天上人間(Petals floating on streams, returning to their end. The past and now is like the haven and the earth)”. If you are familiar with Hong Kong pop culture, you may also think of Wyman Wong’s lyrics and Sing-Fung Ka’s movies. 流水落花 resembles the opposite of obsession, which forms a strong contrast with the behavior of the computer program in the work. To be obsessed and then insane, or to let go and then forget, is the biggest problem in this post-XX era.