Remember That Lesson About Time (2015) from Alex Yiu on Vimeo.
Remember That Lesson About Time
6’40”
2015
Video with stereo sound
Subvocalisation. Wakey-wakey. A lesson about time.
In a corner of my room at London, I put two alarm clocks and turn them into the same time. However, because of the inaccuracy of the alarm clocks’ mechanism, I decided to return to my seat during the gap between the ringing of the alarm clocks, and humming a Cantopop song “Tourbillon" which the lyric is written by Wyman Wong for Eason Chan. In the video, I translate the lyric into homonym and put it as subtitle. By merging the ticking sound of the clocks, I try to reinterpret the unnoticeable corner with sound and words within the fading and limited time.
This work “Remember that Lesson about Time” proposes music video as the carrier, inscribing the lyrics from the video with characters of the same pronunciation, encouraging its audience to recite them before realising that it, indeed, is a popular song. I have applied the unique “one pronunciation, multiple characters” quality of Chinese characters, and through word shifts, he illustrates the concept of “Différance” as proposed by Derrida – that language is the process as memories are comprehended.
有聲的。夠鐘。關於時間。
在英國宿舍房間的一個角落，我放下兩個鬧鐘，並將之調教成同一時間。但因為鬧鐘的時刻並不太準確，因此在兩個鬧鐘響起的時間，我回到自己的座位，輕輕哼著黃偉文給陳奕迅填詞的《陀飛輪》。在影像裡，我加上了同音異字的歌詞，加上鬧鐘跳動的節奏，用聲音和錯亂的文字，嘗試在流逝的時間裡，重新演繹微小而不顯眼的角落。
《記住那關於光陰的教訓》以音樂錄像為載體，將錄像中流行曲歌詞以同音字表記出來，刺激觀眾嘗試去唸出來，才領悟到這是首頗為流行的歌，藝術家利用了漢字一音多字的特點，通過文字的轉換來展釋了德里達所提出延異DIFFÉRANCE—語言是被記憶理解的過程。
