Critique as a Method in Search of Creative Journey (2) Critique as a Method in Search of Creative Journey (2) Critique as a Method in Search of Creative Journey (2)

In 2022, Danny Yung was invited to present “X-Xperimenting Exhibition Danny Yung 50 Year Creations”,. a retrospective of his cross-media art practice since the 1970s, at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. At the same time, the exhibition is an opportunity to reimagine and extend his past work, and to reintroduce to the audience Yung’s years of experience in cross-media experimental art, criticism, advocacy, conservation and development.

In preparing for this retrospective, he recognised the challenges of archival preservation and questioned the exhibition further: what is history? Who is writing history? Who is documenting? Who is interpreting facts? Who is commenting? What are the platforms of knowledge? Who decides what knowledge is preserved and disseminated? From this perspective, we can also use these questions to reflect on our own personal practices and observations as history. If (artistic) action can be seen as an alternative narrative of history,  (art) documenting would be a re-examination of history.

Here, with the help of another video edited from Scene 5 “He Was Warned Not to Enter the Theatre” of Interrupted Dream, Danny Yung elaborated on the view of recording and editing as a commentary on the work, as well as a critique on the method of the first-hand documentation (recording as a interpreting art-making).

 We can see that the video consists of a “rehearsal” in the middle of the performance, actual rehearsal footage, and footnotes projected on the stage set. Of course, there is also one table and two chairs on the stage and movements from the traditional Chinese opera, all of which are important elements that appear repeatedly in the work.

In addition, the audience is captured in different images by the camera on stage, which is an integral part of the “play”. It allows the audience to see themselves in the projection, and they suddenly become the “he” who was warned not to enter the theatre. In this way, the structure becomes content that echoes the proposition, and similarly, the content becomes the skeleton of the structure. The audience is reminded that they are only participating in a theatrical action, and they face the problem directly, rather than enjoying a performance that has already completed itself. The same concept applies to the editing and dissemination of this video.

Danny Yung then explained that the video editing was also done by one of the actors in Interrupted Dream, and that the editing process was an attempt to organise different materials of the performance outside the onstage perspective, and to sort out possibilities of a discourse that is more than repeating what has already been established by the performance. Therefore, the editing of this video is not an attempt to record the performance itself objectively, but rather an attempt to allow the participants of the performance (and ideally any member of the creative team) to utilise video as another medium, to re-examine in another framework the theatrical performance (live art) inevitably compressed into two dimensions, and to make their own critique through this exercise.

It aims to reconstruct, convert, complete, and even strengthen the inadequacy of the live performance. Only in this way can the creators and the audience, as participants, make further comments on the work and even the medium itself.

Both art-making and criticism are open-ended actions, and both are essential to the development of the arts, a point emphasised by Yung. This leads us to further consider the possibilities of art criticism as a discipline and as content. By re-examining the existence of critics, artists might be able to incorporate a sense of critique into their works in addition to conceptualisation during the creative process, so as not to limit their own identity’s position and imagination.

Danny Yung shared his past experience of associating his works with criticism. This can perhaps be seen as a way for the artist to critique one’s past work, which could be extended outward to a critique of one’s time, or inward to an exploration of the self. This approach also stems from Yung’s involvement in establishing the Hong Kong Arts Development Council 30 years ago upon invitation by the government, and therefore advocating for representatives of the art criticism community on its board of directors to establish the International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong). This institutionalisation of art criticism became a strategy to maintain independence and sustainability of arts development, away from political or commercial interference.

The speech was concluded with the same video piece as the opening. But this time, unlike the opening which was mostly silent, the video was accompanied by “Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major”, a symphony that Beethoven would have used to honour Napoleon. While working on Interrupted Dream, Danny Yung had shared multiple times a story of how, after he had finished his work, Beethoven erased the dedication to his Third Symphony, “The Hero,” leaving a blank page. On the title page, Beethoven left a comment that reads: “In memory of a great man”. In the end, Beethoven refused to write the general’s name because of his disappointment with Napoleon’s accession to the throne.

This video is the final scene of the performance, in which one of the actors lying on the floor is seen to sit up slowly as the symphony and the video progress, followed by other actors who stepped onto the stage one by one, gathering on the edge of the front stage, closest to the audience. They faced the same direction as the audience, watching the video that appeared in the performance once again. At last, the video changes from a wave of people seen from above to waves in the sea, then red frame appears, until the entire screen becomes red, which were finally washed away by blank white lights, then were dimmed slowly, ending the whole performance.

The difference between a leader and a hero in the development of the arts is questioned here—is it a leader or a hero that is really needed? Furthermore, in the development of art, how do artists place themselves in different roles and shifting identities?

Through the process of shifting in between, the artist could reconstruct one’s relationship with the external framework and attempt to construct an institutionalised self. It means thinking back and forth between the active and the passive, the individual and the organisational, the regional and the global and so on, in order to be ready to respond to changing systems. By placing oneself in one’s usual position, it is also like allowing an actor to participate in editing which is the critique of a performance in which one has participated, in order to re-examine the whole of oneself in a position that is unseen from the stage.

In line with the theme of this lecture: “Art as Record, Record as Criticism, Criticism as Art”,  by sharing the onstage and offstage experience of Interrupted Dream as a case study, in practice of art as a way to record social events, and through record it acts as carrier for a critique of the events themselves. Ultimately critique is used as a driving force for artistic creation, so that creators can find their own creative context in a cross-disciplinary awareness.