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.
Remember That Lesson About Time (2015) is a 6'40" video with stereo sound, made in a corner of my room in London. I placed two alarm clocks set to the same time, and occupied the gap created by the slight inaccuracy between their rings by quietly humming Tourbillon (陀飛輪), a Cantopop song with lyrics written by Wyman Wong for Eason Chan. In the video, the lyrics are replaced with homophones—Chinese characters sharing the same pronunciation but carrying entirely different meanings—presented as subtitles against the ticking of the clocks. The substitution invites the viewer to recite the text aloud, gradually recognising something already lodged in their own memory. In the gallery, the video is presented on a CRT television placed directly in a corner of the room, overlaying the filmed corner with a physical one. Working through the unique one-pronunciation, multiple-characters quality of Chinese, the piece treats language not as a fixed record of time, but as a site where memory slips, defers, reconstitutes itself, and then forgets it ever did so.
有聲的。夠鐘。關於時間。
《記住那關於光陰的教訓》(2015) 是一件時長 6'40" 的立體聲錄像作品，攝於我在倫敦宿舍房間的一個角落。我在那裡放下兩個鬧鐘，將兩者調到同一時間。鬧鐘的機械走時本就不夠精準，於是我在兩次鈴聲之間的空隙，回到座位，輕輕哼著黃偉文為陳奕迅填詞的廣東流行曲《陀飛輪》。在錄像裡，歌詞以同音異字的方式呈現為字幕，配合鬧鐘的節拍聲。這種替換邀請觀眾嘗試唸出字幕，在不知不覺間，從記憶深處辨認出那首早已熟悉的歌。展出時，錄像以一部陰極射線管電視機播放，置於展場的角落，將錄像裡的角落與現實空間的角落疊合為一。借助漢字一音多字的特性，作品將語言視為一個不固定的時間記錄，而是一個讓記憶不斷滑移、延宕、重新拼湊，然後忘記這一切曾經發生過的場所。
