My work heavily based on personal experience of confusion of self-identification. I work on video. I have taken the idea of being a Hongkonger as natural and for granted, but this idea has been shaken after a journey to the United States. I enjoy the days in foreign countries and am open to be acculturated and enculturated by a diversity of cultures. One unexpected side-effect brought by those encounters would be the estrangement of the idea of ‘self’, ‘ego’ or ‘self-identity’. If I stay in the U.S. for long enough and have the biological factors excluded, through learning their language and lifestyle with my cultural competence skill, maybe I can become an American. With the facilitated communication across cultures, the identity of ‘self’ categorized under nationalities and ethnicities has become a blurred concept. How can we devide between ‘myself’ and ‘themselves’? What is the dividing line that separates ‘ourselves’ and ‘themselves’? How do we develop our perception of ‘myself’?
If the identity of Hongkonger is not derived from our territory and border, languages or original nationalities, what are the carriers for self-identification?
I’ve experienced these struggles and thoughts repeatedly and I wish this series of work can serve as a discussion of ‘ego’, self-identity and self recognition as a Hongkonger.
‘Q and A’ is a question-and-answer section about identities. I invited expatriates to read out the Q and A lines in Cantonese, which is a dialect spoken by Hongkongers. The upper row of subtitle from every scene are extracted from movies that portray the idea of identity. The questions and answers involved in the video clip are unrelated but are both drawn from the movies related to identity recognition. They are juxtaposed in hopes to create the effect of identity confusion. Cantonese is designed to be used as the language the expatriates communicate in so as to emphasize the sense of deviation between ethnicities and languages, and to highlight different understandings of self-identity arising from appearance and ego.
In every scene, the lower row of subtitle is actually what was heard by Sandro, an Italian-HongKong biracial, when the upper row of subtitle is played to him. Born in Belgium but raised in Hong Kong, Sandro is not proficient in Cantonese. He, however, has a Hongkonger appearance. How shall him identify himself? A Hongkonger, Italian, Belgian, or others? What was heard by Sandro have a fairly great difference with the original meaning of the sentences. I hope to use this discrepancy to depict the representation and manifestation of the blurriness of self-identification. In addition to it, I hope to illustrate the importance of languages to the construction of self-identities through this piece of work.
Upon the creation of this series of work, I have discovered and realized profound implications on the idea of self, how self connects and interacts with conceptions of languages and ethnicities. This is by no means not the end. Our society should still strive to ask more questions and look into how art can convey these ideas.

‘Identity’ showed that mother-tongue is only one of the many factors that can build our identity while languages distinguishes different ethnic groups. Self-identity should not be limited by language barriers, but may still conceptualise and identify the construct the idea of ‘self’.

‘Anyone can be anything’ is a to highlight and question about self-identity, as well as to find out the realm and meaning of such idea. As the title of the work implies, Hongkongers may not necessarily be the only ones who are entitled to say ‘I am a Hongkonger’. At the same time, Hongkongers may not be the actual ‘Hongkongers’ as we perceive diresctly. The interviewees in my project, who are not ‘Hongkongers’, used to wear westernised outfit, have blonde hair and green iris. They however have had their hair dyed black and speaks Cantonese in the clip. What affects us in identifying ourselves? Is it self-consciousness, appearance and racial characteristics, or others? Is yellow complexion and black hair equivalent to ‘the descendants of the dragon’ (Chinese)?

Dye
Hair on paper, sound, 22 x 32 cm, loop, 2015

The work is revised to discuss the relationship between my university and me. I studied Fine Arts in the Chinese University of Hong Kong of three years and graduated this year. My university, to which I have grown a strong sense of belonging, has a great impact on my life. I projected the activities of my room on the history book of my university in real time. The reason of choosing my room of the student apartment in university is that I reckon it as the most private place and I spent most of the time there. The book is a newsletter of the university published in the 1970s, when the university was just founded at that time. It is in handwritten form and it recorded every single details of the university at that time. For example, which staff member was having a vacation or which professor is sick. This kind of newsletter has not been published ever. I project the image of my room on the newsletter. It is also in real time in order to evoke and strengthen the sense of ‘reality’ as the matters happened in real time are out of our control in some ways. The newsletter represents the history of the university and next to it is the activity of a student’s room, which is happening ‘now’. The past and present, the great university and the little student form a strong contrast. The camera in my room is focusing the images under the table as to create a feeling of being peeped, or an invasion of privacy. The live video describes different the perspectives towards the school from a student and from the authority.

*1992 in Hong Kong

lhm@lawhoman.com / melodylawvivian@hotmail.com
www.lawhoman.com

Law Ho Man (b.1992) is an independent artist from Hong Kong. She is now working and living in Berlin. She received her Bachelor in Fine Arts (B.F.A.) at Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2014. Her works examine about identity, migration and culture by creating videos. Her works has been exhibited in various institutions in Hong Kong and Europe.