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Dr. LAI, Chiu Han Linda 黎肖嫻
Academic Qualifications:
Ph.D. Cinema Studies, New York University, New York, USA
M.A., Communication-print journalism, Wheaton College Graduate School, Illinois, USA
B.A. (Hons.), Major - English Language & Literature, Minor - Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
Introduction:
| A Ph.D. in Cinema Studies (NYU), with her M.A. training in communication and journalism (Wheaton), and undergraduate studies in literature and fine arts, Linda LAI is now coordinator of the study area Critical Intermedia (CIL) at SCM's Bachelor of Arts in Creative Media program, and the School's Director of Teaching & Learning. She is a trans-disciplinary artist, writer, and independent curator for contemporary and media arts. |
Teaching philosophy & curricular innovations:
| Lai has regarded teaching as both a location for exchange with young people and that for research in pushing the limits of disciplinary boundaries. Evolving from her prime training in cultural and media/cinema studies, she has actively sought connective extension to other relevant art and cultural domains. With such an orientation, she has not only taught cultural studies subjects, contemporary art, film histories and theories, but also authored various innovative courses at SCM. For example, she started the local universities' first sonic art course in the context of contemporary art and cultural studies, the first visual ethnography course in which cinema studies, contemporay art, digital media and anthropological research are in rigorous dialogue, as well as the course Generative Art & Literature, in which experimental literature and code-writing are examined together to illumine the nature of computational thinking. She has been active in experimenting with her colleagues new pedagogic models, especially what is now called the "concept-driven workshop/laboratory" model in which the teaching of theory and history is intensely integrated with art-making, and where a process-oriented approach re-defines artmaking as a passage of discovery through rule-driven experiments and hypothetical thinking across media. In this light, she has also designed and taught a series of "concept-driven workshops" on narrative explorations and experimentations with moving images. She also created SCM's first-year core "Creative Writing" (workshop) in which writing is experienced as the meeting point of creativity, intermedia thinking, self articulation and research. |
Research-Creation: publications and artistic achievements
Her critical and creative works in general have a strong concern for language and micro/meta-narrativity, grounded in a feminist sensibility that integrates critical theory, cultural studies and historiography. Her academic writings so far have a focus on urbanity, cultural memory and identity politics in cinema, as well as theoretical issues in cultural historiography, issues of remediation and impact on epistemology. Her published works on Hong Kong and Chinese cinema has been frequently cited and assigned as core readings.
Most of her creative works have a visual, auto-ethnographic dimension. Her video art, installation and digital works have been shown in funded exhibitions in Hong Kong, and in art and film/video festivals in Oberhausen, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, Taipei, New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Kaohsiung and Seoul. She had been in competition twice at the prestigious Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Germany) in 5 years. Two of her most recent video works (completed 2009) are featured at the 34th Hong Kong International Film Festival's inaugural edition of Short Film Competition(Mar-Apr 2010), the 12the International Women's Film Festival in Seoul (April 8-15, 2010), and the Athens International Film & Video Festival (Ohio, USA, April 23-29, 2010).
Of her various academic and sponsored publications, her personal favorites are two art-books. One is Crypto-glyph: Dialogues in Many Tongues in the Hidden Crevices of an Open City (2004) with Theresa Junko Mikuriya, a 288-page documentation of their 8 rounds of dialogues via photography and text. The book also carries her theoretical meditations on the dynamic relations between visuality and writing as a performance. Her next favorite is [Re-]fabrication: Choi Yan-chi's 30 Years, the paths for interdisciplinarity in art (1975-2005) (2007), researched and edited for Para/Site Art Space's "Hongkong Artists in the 1980s" series. Her recent contribution includes the essay "Attempting a history of (new) media arts for Hong Kong: archaeology, literacy and education for artists" for the Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2007 (2008), a first essay of its nature to trace the fragments of events that would culminate in a history of Hong Kong's media art activities. Another essay, "What is the Writing Machine Collective (WMC)? – Many Beginnings," is contribution to a Videotage publication, Glow in the Dark – Spotting Art, Noise, Media in Hong Kong, to be coming out soon.
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Community service & whole-person engagement
Lai had been a juror for various editions of IFVA (Independent Film & Video Awards, Hong Kong) and the Bloomberg Emerging Artists Program, and adviser to the Museum of Art and Hong Kong Arts Development Council's Media Art sector. She is also the founder and currently Artistic Director of the Writing Machine Collective, a local new medium group, and on its behalf, she has been awarded major exhibition grants twice by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
As SCM's Director of Teaching & Learning, she has sought to implement SCM's unique art and whole-person educational philosophy via the annual week-long Year One Orientation. She also oversees and organizes various co-curricular activities to enhance the intended curriculum learning outcomes of different study areas within SCM. These activities include artists-in-residence, scholars/artists/filmmakerss talks, study tours and exhibitions.
In her capacity as an educator and artist, Linda has worked with many young and aspiring art practitioners in Hong Kong. |
Research Interest
- Contemporary and experimental art
- Avant-garde cinema
- Generative art and literature, automatism in art and literature
- Narrative exploration in new media
- Cultural Historiography
- Documentary films & visual ethnography
- Film histories and theories; early cinema, Chinese cinemas
- Critical theories and cultural studies
Favorite quotes:
"The life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order." (Walter Benjamin)
"So much of what really 'counts' to people in our society goes on in secret." (J. Douglas, "Existential Sociology," unpublished paper)
"The most fearful thing in life is when I find all the words I need to put my emotions," says Elviar, the disturbed protagonist in Fassbinder's The Year with 13 Moons.
"The object-universe, like the unconscious dimension of history, is in fact impervious to language. … Our apprehension of it, then, is strictly filtered through systems of knowledge and belief that are perforce circumstantial and local but continually present and always renewed through representation. Yet the real world is not merely a figment of language. The world of objects is there, terribly 'real' in resisting human modification." (Tom Conley, translator's Introduction to Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History) |
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