GOLDEN

Golden is a multi-stranded ongoing practice-led research project by susan pui san lok, comprising a series of interrelated works across video, sound, installation, net and live media, curated events, and publications. Golden aims to explore possibilities for a critical aesthetics and poetics of place, nostalgia, aspiration and translation in diaspora, within an interdisciplinary creative practice. Key questions include ‘nostalgia’ as a vehicle for negotiating ‘place’ in migration, against the ‘nostalgic’ as a mode of representation; spatial, oral and aural ‘leisure’ practices as processes of inscribing, translating and performing identity, memory, and territory; and their tactical, critical representation.

Concerned with practice-led approaches and alternative concepts for investigating, historicising, narrativising and performing the shifting identities and processes of migration in diaspora, Golden aims to depart from conceptualisations of migrant subjects in terms of binaristic ethno-national conjunctions such as ‘British Chinese’, and their evaluation and identification along economic lines – serving particular industries or offering specific forms of culinary or cultural consumption. Moving also beyond dualistic metaphors that measure degrees of cultural ‘authenticity’ or ‘assimilation’ according to a spatial logic of proximity or distance (situating subjects ‘here/there’ or ‘home/away’), my aim is to develop and explore cultural practices and strategies that examine and embody the movements and co-temporalities of languages, cultures, histories, and subjects in flux; subjects for whom aspirations to ‘settle’ and ‘return’ may not be contradictory, and ‘nostalgia’ may be understood in more complex terms than a ‘backward’ gaze.

Golden focuses on discourses of ‘leisure’, as invoked by particular narratives of a first generation of Hong Kong Chinese immigrants to 1950s’ and 1960s’ Britain, and their reading from second and third generation perspectives; from allotmenteering to storytelling, ballroom dancing to popular song. The following questions inform the wider research context:

• How might processes of ‘settling’ and ‘return’ be imagined, not as a simplistic choice between assimilation or segregation, but as a perpetual negotiation, imitation, adaptation and transformation of ‘host’ languages and cultures, through multiple intergenerational practices and processes of mutual exchange?

• How might ‘nostalgia’ be explored as a means of facilitating or hindering the negotiation of ‘place’ and identity in the present, particularly through the satellite and digital consumption of popular culture?

• Can the habitual movements and ritualised gestures in the solitary tending of soil, and stylised interactions of ballroom dance, serve as comparable metaphors and tactics for the tending of subjective / cultural memory and territory?

• How might the play of pidgins and pauses across ‘standard’ and ‘broken’ Englishes, and various forms of ‘Chinglish’, be heard or spoken tactically to challenge and elude preconceptions and fixed notions of diasporic identity and subjectivity?

• How might a critical aesthetics and poetics of practice, in and of diaspora, that speaks to moving image/sound traditions and popular song, operate against the ‘nostalgic’ as a mode of cultural representation to explore notions of ‘cultivation’, and the contradictions, disjunctures and movements across coincident experiences, histories, and geographies?

Golden was conceived following a three-month stay in Berkeley, California in 2003, and thus far comprises five interrelated parts: Vistas, Songs, Years, Lessons and Notes. Vistas (2005, DVD projection, 5 mins looped) was commissioned in 2004 by Beaconsfield, London, for the group exhibition, ‘Lightsilver’ (23 February – 8 May 2005), while Songs (2005, ongoing, audio, various durations) was initiated during ‘Electric Greenhouse’ (February – April 2005), a digital arts residency organised by artquest in collaboration with b3media. Both pieces, showcased at the ICA as part of the black:creativity programme (London, 2005), were preludes to larger projects. Years (2006, DVD, alternating two-screen projection, 22 mins) was commissioned for a solo exhibition at Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (11 May – 2 July 2006), and Lessons developed in dialogue with Beaconsfield as an exhibition and residency (Beaconsfield, London, 18 October – 10 November, 2006). Notes is an AHRC artist book that both documents and extends the project so far, and is due to be published early 2007.

VISTAS / SONGS / YEARS / LESSONS / NOTES / EVENTS / SPSL / CONTACT

Acknowledgements

Golden has received funding from Arts Council England towards research and development, and from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Diasporas, Migration and Identities programme’s Small Grants scheme, towards the development and production of Golden (Notes). Thanks to Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, Beaconsfield, London, and Resonance 104.4fm. Thanks also to L.C. Lok, Y.Y. Lok, Annie Pui Ling Lok, Mat Davidson, Ben Cummins, Jenevieve Chang, Tammy Arjona, and all the technicians and volunteers who have made various stages of this project possible.