This is my home (2016) from Alex Yiu on Vimeo.
This is My Home
2016
Single channel video and stereo sound
The original footage were captured from the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II to Hong Kong on the 21st of Oct, 1986. It was a carnival where music served as an important function of representing Hong Kong in a critical moment where the colonialism was in the process of being replaced by a mixture of localism and nationalism. While most of the songs were sung in this event are mostly arrangements of Chinese folk songs, the main theme of the jingle is actually an original Children's song "When We Were Young" composed and arranged by Joseph Koo. The metaphorical tension of music here is amplified by the generative audiovisual result of the algorithmic composition which I constructed.
The video jammed with glitches shatters the supposedly flawless visage of the digital. In this electronic world, malfunctions become everyday nuisance and they are quickly eliminated, but the same cannot be implied with real life glitches. The lyrics of “This is My Home” were written by James Wong, a prominent Hong Kong lyricists, for the Queen on her visit to Hong Kong in 1986; the lyrics depict precisely the HongKongese’ hopes and expectations of their land during the 1980s after its economic take-off. Thirty years later, Hong Kong had undergone numerous crises and turmoil; through algorithm, the artist converts the music while withholding traces and fragments of the lyrics, implying that the HongKongese are faced with a no longer familiar land.
充滿GLITCH故障的錄像打破了數碼應該無瑕的概念，在電子的世界中，故障成為滋擾所以被迅速剔除，但現實中的故障卻未必可以如此，《這是我家》是香港著名填詞人黃霑為1986年英女皇訪港匯演所填的詞，確切的描寫了八十年代香港經歷了經濟起飛後，對自己居住地希望與期許，三十年後，香港經歷了各種危機與干擾，藝術家以演算法處理過的音樂所留下歌詞的一鱗半爪，比喻了香港人正在面對一個不再熟悉的地方。
