Openness and Confinement: Dorothy Cheung at CACOA Normalville

I: Could you tell me a little about the background of this project? What was its starting point?

DC: "Letter to the outsider" connects to a film project I did in 2012 that was about activism and about the situation back then in Hong Kong. Part of the film was about the imprisonment of a young female activist. In the film the activist writes letters to her boyfriend, family and supporters out [of prison]. In 2017 [in Hong Kong] we also had some political activists being jailed, and I started thinking about this notion of imprisonment. Later on I realized that there are lots of re-purposed prisons in the Netherlands, where people actually pay to enter or they sign up to join a tour to visit, and these seemed to me very contradicting ideas, the first about being forced to be in a space and the other about paying for being in it. But actually the space is the same, it’s just people’s perception that is different. In this work I tried to explore this notion of perception of the space through video and images.

I: Most of your work focuses on people and has a strong humanist content. How do you work with people? What kind of methods do you follow?

DC: The one thing that comes back for me is the text. I started out as a poet, so when I work with images I think about text and about people’s words, how they talk and the way they talk about personal experiences. In this work I didn’t involve actual people. I just worked with myself and with writing my personal ideas, and then fabricated the images using also the voice over text.

I: You stated that you usually think and work with text. How does your process of working with text proceeds? Do you make several drafts of the text or is your text improvised in any way?

DC: I usually write quite slowly, I take a long time to write the first draft and then let it settle down a bit and I go on with other things that are related to the theme or with the style I want to convey with my next work. Then I will go back to the draft and build up on it and edit things out. I will maybe have some feedback sessions with people and see how the draft works. Or I will just be on my own and spend time with the text itself before I pin anything down.

I: Besides poetry and writing, what are for you other sources of inspiration? Which disciplines fascinate you and informed the project on show at the CACOA?

DC: I like watching experimental documentary films that invite the audience to observe space. I feel I can get inspiration from this kind of film, especially by observing through the director’s eyes.

I: You mentioned documentary as a source of inspiration. Do you see your work as documentary, as fiction, or as something in between?

DC: I feel it’s always the best position to be something in between. Documentary has its own tradition and also its own ethical questions. I respect it, but i don’t think I can ever make a documentary in this way. I prefer to make my work more like poetry, which is intimate and personal, and sometimes may not stick to reality as much as documentary does. But it isn’t entirely fictional, as it’s something that came from real experience. So it is true but not so much about factual events.

I: One of your recurring themes is the way people deal with the present moment. How does your way of looking at what’s happening now reach beyond the present? How do you think the present can be relevant also to reflect on past and future?

DC: If you think about anything happening now you have to think also think about its past. But I see it in a non-linear way, flooding from present to past to future and back to the present. I think it’s nice for the audience to see the work flowing into different times and as a non-linear experience.

I: What is the connection of the current project with your previous work?

DC: My previous work is mostly about still photography and writing. I see a connection between these two mediums, as they can convey similar ideas but in very different ways. With the new work I am trying to explore a new medium [moving image] and connect it with the practice that I had previously.

I: How does your creative process affect the work itself? Do you carefully plan ahead and follow a pre-established route or are you open to chance, disruption, unexpected moments?

DC: The text is carefully planned, since I have lots of time to work with it and I don’t have many constraints. The moving image part is only partly planned because I know which places I am going to work with, but at the same time on site I am going to take time to observe. Sometimes I’m just going to set up the camera and see what happens. Sometimes something interesting is going to unfold and I’m happy I don’t have to plan for it, and I think this is also the beauty of this kind of practice.

I: What kind of relationship does your work have with the exhibition space? Are these two elements talking to each other or are they completely separate? For instance, did you have the CACOA in mind while you were developing this project or did you adapt it to the existing space at a later stage?

DC: In my mind I always envisioned the exhibition space for this work divided into smaller pockets or narrower spaces to convey this idea of confinement. When I began to work with the CACOA I started to think about how I should divide the space, cutting it in smaller spaces and dead ends so I could trigger the audience to feel about being confined.

I: what kind of experience do you wish to offer the CACOA visitors? What kind of engagement do you demand from them and what kind of reaction do you expect?

DC: I feel people should have different responses, depending on what they experienced personally. I’m looking forward to them spending more time with the space itself, because I think that for a work like this it takes time for people to immerse themselves and to observe, like it happened to me while I was working on the project. So the only thing i would ask the people visiting is to spend more time within the space and to have patience when things are not moving as fast as in much video art.

I: Do you think it’s essential for visitors that are not familiar with you to have any introduction to your themes and working process beforehand? Do you wish to make statements with this project or do you see it as totally open to interpretation?

DC: I would like to keep the work open. The idea of imprisonment is very universal in a way. The background of me making a political work can be an appendix, but I don’t think people should stick to this idea. They should instead contribute their own experience. I think it’s more powerful than offering my own statement that people have their own interpretation and connections.