Queer (Re)animation : the affective language of video art in Ellen Pau's Song of the goddess

Abstract

This dissertation provides an extensive analysis of Hong Kong video artist Ellen Pau’s Song of the Goddess (1992), a video project featuring discontinuous shots of the cantonese opera film The Emperor Lee (1968), footages of passing subway platforms and an intimate scene of a woman showering another’s body. Anchored around a discussion of the historical emergence of video art practices in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a consideration of the public and cultural representations of queer or tongzhi communities during this time, this dissertation argues that Pau’s development of an affective language of video art allowed her to enact in Song of the Goddess a queer subjectivity that contrasted representation of queer performance in popular Cantonese visual culture in the late twentieth century. Working with the opportunities and constraints presented by the materiality of video making, Pau was able to employ the video surface itself as a carrier of narrative, departing from moving image conventions that relied on characters and representation. By removing narrative elements from Emperor Lee, Pau’s piece departs from discussions of queer performance that surrounded discussions of the film’s lead actresses, Yam Kim-Fai and Pak Suet-Sin, as well as other cantonese pop culture icons, to focus on a lived queer experience and its modulation of desire. Responding to Yam’s passing in 1989, Pau’s artwork “reanimates” Yam and Pak’s archival footage to dismantle its status as a functional cultural object.