An Evening With Videotage

On October 15th, AAAinA is thrilled to share an in-person screening featuring experimental video shorts selected from the archives and curatorial history of Videotage, ranging across works from the late 1980s and early 2020s.

Founded in 1986, the Hong Kong-based organization Videotage is an iconic, evolving and enduring artist-founded, artist-centered infrastructure, that has championed experimental video and art engaged with new media for nearly four decades across a range of mediums, approaches and formats. A crucial leader and contributor in the Sinospheric video ecologies of Hong Kong and beyond, Videotage provided artists with important international platforms and opportunities for creating, presenting and historicizing video. Among Videotage’s many initiatives was an annual compilation of VHS tapes that the organization began producing in 1992, whose selections retrospectively examined Videotage’s recent programming, while annotating the changing field of video in Hong Kong, its diasporas, and region.

This program draws from Videotage’s VHS compilation series, featuring video by artists presented on tapes such as Lost and Found (1992) and Video Girls (2001), along with work by artists presented by Videotage in the 2010 and 2020s. This intergenerational program presents work rarely shown in the United States, by some of Videotage’s original founders Ellen Pau and Yau Ching, and younger artists more recently involved with Videotage, whose emerging practices extend the ethos of Videotage’s commitment to critical experimentation, and video as a medium of ongoing, unexpected transformation. Pau’s digital archives were shared on AAA’s website in 2022, and can be further explored through the following LINK.

The screening will be followed by a hybrid conversation between Doris Poon, Hsu Fang-Tze and Jeannine Tang.

This is a collaborative event hosted by Asia Art Archive in America, co-organized with Videotage and NYU’s Department of Performance Studies, with curatorial programming by Doris Poon from Videotage. The program extends conversations in Electronic Arts Intermix’s recent release of The New Television: Video After Television, eds. Rachel Churner, Rebecca Cleman and Tyler Maxin (MIT Press and no place press, 2024), which features a new essay on Videotage’s queer and feminist contributions by Hsu Fang-Tze and Jeannine Tang.

Participant Bios:

Doris POON is the Program Director at Videotage, with over a decade of experience in the arts and cultural sector, including roles at Para Site, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, and the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. She views organizational work as a vital form of curatorial practice and is committed to advancing the media art community by creating presentation opportunities for artists and fostering thought-provoking discussions.

Fang-Tze HSU is a curator at the Singapore Art Museum and a member of the Videotage’s Board of Directors, with previous experience as a lecturer in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Over the past decade, she has extended her expertise beyond academia, actively engaging as a curator, film programmer, and archivist. Her current research pursuits revolve around the nuanced exploration of sonic modernity, Cold War aesthetics, and the convergence of critical curation historiography with a decolonial pedagogical approach.

Jeannine TANG is an art historian from Singapore, who teaches as Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. Jeannine’s book project Living Legends: Contemporary Art & Transgender History received a 2020 Warhol Writer’s grant; other publications on contemporary art, exhibition and curatorial history, queer and trans cultures have appeared in venues such as Art Journal, Artforum, GLQ, Theory Culture & Society, journal of visual culture, Art India, anthologies including Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (New Museum & MIT Press, 2017).

Light refreshments will be provided.

AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation.

Host or Publisher Asia Art Archive in America