Faster, higher

Artist's book published by Film & Video Umbrella, 2009 and edited by susan pui san lok and Nina Ernst, with original essays by Chris Berry and Adrian Rifkin. The book features extensive documentation of the artist’s installation at BFI Southbank Gallery (29 May – 30 August 2008), reproductions of Olympic archive and rarely seen Chinese documentary material, as well as stills from new footage shot on various locations in London, including the London Wushu Academy in Leytonstone, and the perimeter of the 2012 Olympic site. The book expands critically on the work and its themes relating to sporting endeavour, national and cultural identity, Chinese cinematic and contemporary moving image discourses, through two original essays commissioned from Chris Berry (Professor of Film and Television Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London) and Adrian Rifkin (Professor of Art Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London). Berry’s essay, ‘States of Play’, considers the work in contrast to key Chinese films, as a ‘heterotopia of a heterotopia’, reflecting distinctions between sport and play, deconstructing the rehearsal and staging of Britain and especially China as modern Olympic nation states, and the Olympics itself as an endless process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. Rifkin’s essay, ‘Altius, Lentius’ offers a reflexive, close reading of the work and its aesthetic and conceptual tactics. The text’s poetical, fragmented form considers and evokes the mediation, manipulation and re-presentation of archival Olympic and Chinese documentary material in the work, and the disjunctive, absorbing encounters and questions produced by its interrogation and play on the historic values condensed in its motto, citius, altius, fortius. Published by Film and Video Umbrella, 116pp, full-colour, soft-cover limited edition of 1000, in a hardback box, ISBN 978-1-904270-29-4.

Faster, Higher includes material which is copyright Olympic Television Archive Bureau (OTAB), copyright Jim Shum and copyright ITN Source. Original footage copyright susan pui san lok. Installation photography by Dave Morgan.

Faster, Higher was a multi-screen installation commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella and the British Film Institute. Staged as a solo show at BFI Southbank to coincide with the Beijing Olympics and act as an imaginative precursor to London 2012, the work was also exhibited at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, in Hit The Ground (2009), as part of the Great North Run cultural programme. A further solo staging took place at The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre, to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics.
Faster, Higher also featured in The BFI Gallery Book, ed. Elisabetta Fabrizi, as one of 18 exhibitions presented between 2007 and 2010. London: BFI, 2011:75-84, 296pp, full colour, ISBN 978-1-870282-82-6.
A photo-essay of the same name appeared in Hilary Powell and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón eds. The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London's Olympic State. London: Marshgate Press, 2012: 90-99. 304pp, full colour & b&W, ISBN 978-0-9572943-0-1.
A related work, Citius, Altius (2012) was commissioned by SUUM Project for the Samsung IOC Olympics Art Collection, and presented as part of the exhibition, Blue Crystal Ball, at De La Warr Pavilion and AND Festival, Manchester, 2012.