Stefan CANHAM (Photography/ Germany) + Rufina WU (Architecture/ Canada)

PORTRAITS FROM ABOVE : Hong Kong’s Rooftop Communities
… “Our intention is to reveal the creative cultural energy of the rooftop communities to a wider public. In the absence of officially sanctioned space, residents develop innovative tactics to make room for themselves. Such informal architecture and spatial practices typically occupy a subordinate position in the formal discourses on the city. We feel the need to acknowledge alternative modes of habitation that operate outside of the framework of the dominant culture, and to recognize these unconventional praxes as vital forces in the shaping of our built environment. The power of the subaltern lies not only in its potential to bring about social change, but it forces us to question our own conceptions of the world around us with its suggestions for new, alternatives, and potentially revolutionary spatial practices.” …

Sejin KIM (Video Art/ Korea)
http://www.insaartspace.or.kr/mediaWorksViewEN.asp?idx=100

Artist Research Statement
I’ve been working with a variety of media apparatuses, including documentary realism and the visual narrative to explore various and perplexing relationships in a contemporary society. My works utilize the voyeuristic mechanism of media to show violence in today’s society in a paradoxical manner. Also I attempt to show the result of recording and observation about individual in a modern society. This will chronicle the anxiety and fear, loneliness and alienation, conflict and confusion, and such conditions an individual endures in trying to negotiate his/her existence and identity in a society that sustains itself by placing limitations on its members.

This will be an intensive trip for documentation of testimony about people who live in the city as an Asian. Through my video, and photo, even text, I’ll catch the urban scenery with gorgeous and high buildings in HK, will find a symbol which represents their unique culture at the same time. Also I’ll collect people’s angst about their urban life with an interview on the street. My project called ‘The yellow landscape’ will be shown next my exhibition in the middle of 2008 in Korea.