Bookmark the Landmark

2023, video installation, single channel, sized variable

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Ho Wing Michelle LEE extends her research from the looted books during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong to the field research of the Library of the Governor-General of Taiwan, and its temporary office (now the Bangka Qingshui Zushi Temple in Wanhua) during the period of Japanese rule. The project focuses on the different elements of the library: books, architecture and readers, exploring the clues left by the three in historical time and space, and outlining an interpretive path in historical materials.

 

The work is presented in two parts: the first part starts with the artist’s identity as a traveller and an alternative observation of the historical scene in the city, including documenting and exploring the circulation locations of library collections during the war. Through the history of the specificity of the colonial library, the artist wants to search for her personal meanings within the visual rhetoric space. The second part uses the space under renovation as a metaphor, presenting scattered historical fragments from different time and space on the scaffolding structure, showing the renewal and production of space. The parking lot was once the rear hall of Zushi Temple and was one of the locations where collections were stored. Those enclosed spaces are like some spaces of other dimensions, which is constructed as a threshold that can be entered. The historical relics that have yet to be discovered under the parking lot are isolated from real space, similar to the heterotopia mentioned by Foucault, which is situated between the real space and fictional space, and its location contains compressed knowledge and culture. It just so happened that the Temple was being renovated in recent years. The artist printed the traces of the archaeological site where the parking lot was built in the rear hall in collotype to commemorate the founding place of the Library of the Governor-General of Taiwan. By repeatedly transferring the image of the architecture through collotype technique, it is like recreating the walking process of the artist geographically. A copy of the Library of the Governor-General of Taiwan’s library catalogue will be presented in the exhibition, thereby constructing a reading space about the production of colonial knowledge, and presenting the disappeared library in the form of book pages so that everyone can gather and share it.