RoCH fans & legends

This paper sets out to introduce an artistic practice-based creative research project in development, under the rubric, RoCH Fans and Legends. The project is envisaged as a multi-stranded, experimental, necessarily temporary and perhaps impossible mapping, of semi-fictive landscapes and virtual heritages, ancestral imaginaries and imaginary ancestors. Situating myself between the visual languages, spaces and tactics of such experimental moving image artists’ practices as those of Lana Lin, Mayling To and Hito Steyerl, I consider some of the circuits of wuxia consumption and translation, and the parallels between imaged and imagined lives, fractured and reconstructed via always already translated texts – visual and literary, analogue and digital. Referencing my own encounter in the 1980s with Hong Kong television adaptations of The Condor Trilogy, I turn to other encounters in diaspora with the distinct dislocations, travels, and especially ‘poor’ mediatised translations of this highly popular series of wuxia works by Louis Cha Leung-yung, aka Jin Yong. Working across gallery and online contexts as an artist-fan-prosumer, RoCH… aims to engage with the peculiar compressions of time, place and cultures from a subjective and partial geo-cultural-linguistic perspective; to acknowledge the simultaneity of wuxia's encounters, exchanges, translations and inventions in circulation; to examine its potentially subversive tropes; and invoke its enduring appeal, amid amorphous scenes and recurrent dreams.

The paper was presented in the workshop strand, 'Contemporary Art and the Inter-Asian Imaginary', directed by Professors Alice Jim (Department of Art History, Concordia University) and Henry Tsang (Faculty of Culture & Community, Emily Carr University of Art & Design).