Praecox-blueprint

Jamsen's video works @ HKAC

The Lab Series #3: Jamsen Law
@Agnes b. CINEMA! (HK Arts Centre)
Programme 1 (more recent works): 27/8* & 15/9
Programme 2 (from his first work): 30/8* & 16/9 (category III)
* with post-screening discussion with Jamsen
Time: 7:30pm

"The Glamour and the Real in a Personal Discord"
-Extracted from the original article published in Artslink, August 2005 issue (translated from my Chinese original by Ms Teri Chan)

Understanding comes after perplexity. The visuals take a labyrinthine route, relying not on a single concept or structure, but the juxtaposition and disparity, and the ambiguity between image Y and image G. The visuals of his works luxuriate a certain aura, as if soliciting your gaze through an array of gestures. They are not representations, or signs; they are hard to be digested in terms of logics. Sometimes they traverse in their repeating paths in too heavy a makeup, sometimes leave barely a trace after introducing themselves, as illusive as a rosy taint in a garden corner. They barely register their presence. Not a single frame carries a definite identity and meaning. They are like pastiches, but pastiches with egotistic insistence. (Desire rises like hot air, as pure as a soul of a newly deceased from a distance.)

His visual texture of his imagery keeps pushing the envelope of real life experience and perception. Before the mastering of more sophisticated techniques, television monitor or windows with impromptu lighting became his Brechtian Theatre of the night. (Reflection and snowflakes act out the charade, with the main character never shows up.) Is it a introspection and digestion of identity usurpation, or as in I Went There Too, a re-examination of identity morphing through the memories of friends? It is the present surrounding or “I think” that make me confused?

Mapping Four with Twelve may sound promiscuous (referring to the Chinese title 四搭十二 particularly), but what it contains are displays of solitary. The pixels provide the personal (visual) history a good stage. Like reflections of the solar halo, millions of images and relationships can come out of it: alienation, comparison, disparity, metaphor, projection, and elimination…. with the “I” shadowing all screens. Perhaps it is the icon of desire instead which keeps playing the game of private/public space, like the third eye on the forehead, popping up from private imagination and trying to attract attention in the background discreetly. It wants to create stir, and at the same time, it tentatively returns the gaze of the viewers. Probably because of it, under the layers of patterns, the desire and the real are dragged out and painted over. This castration ceremony, lingering between demonstration and self-entertainment, identifying and questioning, becomes a language for the depiction of a psycho-geographic scenery.

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