Those Were the Days: Slide Projector, Karaoke, and Clock

This year's Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival takes 'Time Will Tell' as its theme, but what exactly is time? The Festival exhibits three works from the past that explore different ways of representing time: Andy Li San-kit's Those Moments I Regret About Not Pressing the Shutter, along with Henry Chu's TV Clock and Canto Cocktail.

If a photograph is not just an image of the past, what else could it be?

In Those Moments I Regret About Not Pressing the Shutter (2018–ongoing), Li reconstructs his past to deconstruct the very concept of photography. His experience of studying in Germany led him to lament that 'everyone and everything around me has an expiration date', which inspired him to preserve things through the lens. This marked the beginning of his journey into photography and the use of niche equipment. In his view, photography is always an illusion; only the soul behind the lens and the way things are perceived can be considered real.

This piece subverts the conventional approach of using photography to capture the external world. Scraping the emulsion layer of the slides, he transforms moments he failed to capture into words by inscribing them onto the film. This process allows fragments of the past to become photographs that are looped and reconstructed in a slide projector. Texts like 'The first time I saw myself in a mirror', 'When my mother cried', and 'Moments that should have been happy but were sad' are reconfigured into images on the screen of a compact 1990s projector, infused with its unique texture and coloured by memory. He describes it as a secret diary, where the act of writing and reconstructing these past events relinquishes time, helping him let go of those moments that have, like phantoms, long haunted him. He hopes this work will also prompt viewers to reconstruct their very own missed moments in their minds.

Now, Li has gradually come to realise that such losses are often inevitable and sometimes even necessary. What is more important is to seize the present and engage in the now. Photographs transcend time: they are no longer just about the past. The act of viewing a photograph also embodies a promise of openness to the future.

Does a collage of Cantopop songs still capture the spirit of the genre?

Henry Chu's Canto Cocktail for M+ preserves the flavours of 1980s and 1990s Cantopop songs, serving up not just a beverage but also a recipe. His experience studying in New Zealand ignited his love for Hong Kong culture, as he reminisces about how Cantopop accompanied him through both romance and heartbreak. Canto Cocktail first questions and critiques whether Cantopop songs are formulaic.

By extracting segments from 120 Cantopop songs from the 1980s and 1990s, documenting common chords and rhythms, and analysing and deconstructing lyrics, the work acts as a recipe, mixing up medleys on the spot for viewers to enjoy. It also empowers the viewers by letting them take control, such as adjusting the playback speed, actively engaging them in listening and generating their own tunes.

Canto Cocktail is also Chu’s attempt to reclaim the past. He deliberately chose low-cost canned videos themed around love and dating to create a nostalgic atmosphere, with selections and designs that recreate the Cantopop craze and karaoke experience of that era. In contrast to AI-generated songs, he emphasises that the music generated by the work is based on a transparent and concrete past, with every word grounded in reality, thus making it authentic. This evokes an ambiguity that stretches between the past and the present.

If Canto Cocktail attempts to preserve time, then TV Clock, Chu’s newly remade work for this Festival, witnesses the passage of time. He reorganises real-time television footage into a digital clock, where the changing number of each minute and second is a composite of images extracted from the television at that very moment. The work originated from such instances of watching television without paying much attention, letting hollow information wash over you while somehow using it to measure the passing hours; this is how time flows.

Chu recalls with a smile how, twenty years ago, 'TV Clock witnessed the transformation of Pokémon into a timeless classic.' Along its journey, TV Clock has also witnessed its own evolution as an artwork while simultaneously reflecting the broader transformations of society. 'Time treats everyone equally,' and Chu reveals its ruthlessness and impartiality. The endless passage of time remains unchanged; only the things within it shift, mirroring the unchanging format of TV Clock against the changing content of its programmes.

As viewers witness the changes in TV Clock, the work in turn witnesses the changes in society. Who, then, serves as the ultimate witness? Only the passage of time.