Last month I posted information about the Cheung Chau Wave Arts Festival centered around the small island of Cheung Chau in Hong Kong. At the time I didn't completely understand how the festival was operating, despite being one of the participants. This is an intriguing position to be in and made the whole situation quite interesting.
Festival Poster (Credit: https://www.facebook.com/CheungChauWave)
Recently, I picked up on festival lists that explained more about the festival. The Cheung Chau Wave festival, titled 渡 (Portal) is now presented more fully on the festival website, here and is listed as running from Dec 2020 - Feb 2021.
Festival website listing
Once inside, information can be sought either by genre or by artist name. My recorded performance of 'No holiday' took place on Cheung Chau during the period I called the island my home (2012-2018). The performance was originally conceived for the 'Duration and Dialogue Performance Arts Festival' in Toronto, Canada in 2017 and subsequently gave rise to the ongoing, serial performance it now is. Since then the performance has been recorded and live-streamed from the UK, Venice - Italy and Saigon - Vietnam. <ore performances were planned but these have been postponed due to the COVID-19 situation. As soon as the situation improves it is hoped to resume the saga.
渡 (Portal), the 2020 edition of the annual Cheung Chau Wave Festival, formed part of the planned Inter-island Festival in Hong Kong comprising exhibitions and events based on the island of Cheung Chau, created by artists residing on Cheung Chau or by those with strong connections to the island.
Unfortunately, as in many parts of the world, the planned events and activities had to be drastically reduced due to the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I lived on Cheung Chau from October 2012 until May 2018, after which I left and relocated to Vietnam. My time on the island became a kind of exile, though a thoroughly peaceful and enjoyable one. Every morning I would leave on the ferry for work, while it was still dark, and return in the evening after dusk. Consequently, over the years I didn't form many friendships with other island residents. This was a great pity and was caused by my hermetic lifestyle.
Not long before I finally left the island I was out on a quick shopping trip among the back-streets of the island and I came upon an interesting gathering close to the old fishermen's school. To my surprise it was part of an arts festival organized by artists resident on the island. I was shocked to learn that these and previous events had been organized by a group of like-minded creative residents and I had absolutely no knowledge of the events or the people organizing them.
I had sometimes thought that a festival on the island would be an amazing opportunity, making the most of the island's unique setting and environment, and it was frustrating to have missed a chance to connect with and participate in this festival while living on the island.
Later, now living in Vietnam, I saw an online notice about the 2020 edition of the festival and immediately wanted to participate. I submitted a recording of my serial performance 'No holiday' as it was filmed on the island in 2017. That year had been a productive one for me, creating several versions of the performance and live-streaming it to performance art festivals in Canada and the USA.
'No holiday', Cheung Chau, 2017
Cheung Chau Wave Instagram post
Although many events had to be postponed this year, as far as I am aware, my 'No holiday' performance was screened, along with other work, on the Cheung Chau ferry over the weekend of 4th-6th December 2020.
It gave me deep personal satisfaction to be able to participate in the festival and awakened fond memories of my sojourn on the little island, a time I will never forget.
Cheung Chau Ferry, activity listing
This and other 'No holiday' performances can be viewed here on my YouTube Channel, and are introduced here on my website.
I recently contacted Dr. Blake Morris of the Walking Artist Network (WAN) who is investigating the walks featured in the wonderful book 'Ways to Wander' by Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind as part of his practice-based research (Blake also contributed one of the walks in the book - No.28). He plans to walk all of the 54 various walks in the book, one each week and I expressed my interest in participating in one of them.
Blake invited me to join him for walk No. 9 - 'Walk with me' by Helen Frosi (soundfjord) on March 3, 2018. The plan was for Blake and Marina White Raven to walk in London while simultaneous walks were taking place in Spain (by Elia Cervera Bravo and Amery Kessler) and Hong Kong (which is where I come in).
As we walked, we would be able to write comments and poetic reflections that follow the theme of the original walk, and post them onto twitter, tagging the others so that there would be an exchange of comments during the walk..
The time difference between London and Hong Kong is 8 hours so in order for this to work I conducted my walk earlier in the day and scheduled my posts using the hootsuite app. Each of my posts were scheduled to be online later in the day, during the period when the others were walking.
The event lasted around 90 minutes and as I walked, besides posting photographs with accompanying comments, I also made sound recordings and collected colours using the citypalette app.
Once all data from the day had been collected by Blake, he consolidated much of it into the next episode of his overall project. Walk No. 9 had been written in the form of a poem and in response Blake managed to combine several of the exchanged comments into another poem.
The two poems are seen here, the pink background (named by Blake 'Sickly Sky') was one of the colours collected by him during the walk.
Blake's walk poem
Walk with me by
Helen Frosi (SoundFjord)
(text distorted due to the photograph)
As Blake investigates each walk, he completes a card reference for each one and posts it on his blog (links here and here)
Blake's reference card for the walk
Here are the photographs I posted onto Twitter along with the accompanying comments:
1/11 'A good beginning, the delayed Chinese New year peach blossom blooms today'
2/11 'Gateway leads to a desolate house, I move on...'
3/11 'These days even the trees are restless, some of them uproot themselves and leave...'
4/11 'Passing the little Temple, from now on I will try to stay within sight of the sea, the sound of the waves is comforting.'
5/11 'The line between the sea and the land, why do I feel so comfortable being close to the edge of something?...'
6/11 'The raised pathway makes me feel as though I am on a catwalk, but the only audience I see are birds...'
7/11 'An entrance to a seminary. Inside, nature is groomed into formal rows while outside lies chaos, and beauty.'
8/11 'A fallen tree but this is not an end. For nature this is another beginning.'
9/11 'A gentle slope, not a climb...an inclination!'
10/11 'Returning now to the streets where I began my walk I find a painting created by nature - the finest, most honest artist.'
I also made four sound recordings during the walk:
1. Cantonese radio playing outside the Temple, birds singing in the background.
2. Birds singing, radio faintly heard in the background.
3. Soloist bird along with bird chorus accompaniment.
4. Young boy playing basketball alone in a playground at the end of my walk.
Sound files here:
Sounds edited together with accompanying images here:
...and the colour palette I compiled during the 90 minutes:
11/11 'Colours collected during my walk.' 3 March 2018.
While working on the planning of a performative walk in collaboration with the UK-based artist Blake Morris, he introduced an interesting and useful app to me that had been developed by friends of his: Taylor and Bob Snead and Chloe Bass - City Palette.
City Palette
As my work often involves aspects of recording experiences in outdoor locations, this app was attractive and so I tried it out at two locations: Tung Wan and Nam Tam Wan on Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong. For these tests I restricted myself to 8 colours.
It quickly became apparent that it is important to set rules for its usage if colours captured in different locations are to be compared. The palette can be manipulated somewhat if the user focuses in too much on selected colours rather than recording the 'ambient' colours encountered at each place visited. However, several different ways of using it have become clear to me and I'm sure that this app will prove useful in some of my on-going projects.
The palettes recorded at the two locations are as follows:
While rearranging old notebooks I found an outline for idea that I hadn't previously found time to initiate, so this being the holiday period I spent a morning to kick-start the project and move it along a little bit.
The final incarnation of the piece depends entirely upon what I find on the beach and so this process of selection may take a while. For this particular piece I am in no hurry so I can take my time and ensure that the selection of the elements is appropriate.
The underlying aim is an attempt to push my landscape drawing into a more physical, sculptural manifestation.
Below I have attached two photos of the selection process on the beach:
31.12.2017 - Tai Kwan Wan, Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong
31.12.2017 - Tai Kwan Wan, Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong
I had been working on different projects that related to the Sisyphus myth and eventually one group of experimental threads coalesced into a resolved performance piece.
It is said that in order to reach a state of enlightenment and experience nirvana, we must first rid ourselves of worldly delusions. Nirvana literally means something like 'extinguishing' or 'quenching' and the flame that we must extinguish is that of greed, hatred and other selfish and worldly obsessions.
I wished to demonstrate such a struggle and in this performance I found a simple, I should say simplistic, method of encapsulating this struggle. In the performance, I act as another Sisyphean character attempting to extinguish the candle that represents the delusions that must be quenched, and as is the nature of the Sisyphean experience, each attempt fails...the candle relights itself. After a period I try again, only to fail again (shades of Beckett's famous line from Worstward Ho: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better').
This struggle could continue for ever but, thankfully, the candle eventually extinguishes itself after running out of wax and paraffin vapour. So is this the end of the struggle? Perhaps not because as often is the case in life, these tasks are set not by others but by ourselves. We often bring on these torments to ourselves without even realising it.
The beginning of the performance alludes to this, as I am the one who lights the candle thereby initiating the process, which is why I incorporated the lighting of the candle into the performance.
Referring back to a previous post about the photographic project I am undertaking at Nam Tam Wan on Cheung Chau Island - Hong Kong, I have now finally arrived at a satisfactory format for the book of images I would like to publish.
I do not intend to print up multiple copies, instead I will present, exhibit and promote the book myself and I will only print copies upon request. This means the book is therefore not being produced commercially and the price cannot be reduced by large unit numbers.
Below I have attached low-resolution captures of the introduction and two pages of images.
If you are interested in purchasing copies of the book, please contact me using my email address: patricksford@live.com
The book is 8" x 10" 20 x 25cm, portrait format, 64 pages, 60 images, colour photos taken by phone camera, 1 image per page, title page, introduction page, blank page at the back, the hard-back cover is black with white lettering on the spine, spine text reads: Nam Tam Wan 2016 Patrick S. Ford
A review of the book as well as an interview I conducted with the 'Local Idea' section of the 'Lik Ink' website and blog can be found here: https://www.likink.com/patrick-s-ford/
