Danny Yung speaks at The 34th SIBMAS Conference 2024 Danny Yung speaks at The 34th SIBMAS Conference 2024 Danny Yung speaks at The 34th SIBMAS Conference 2024

The presenter had invited Yung to be one of the keynote speakers. The conference culminated with his keynote lecture in which he shared his insights and decades-long experiences on “Conserving, Restaging, and Interpreting the Performing Arts”.

Photo: International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong)

Yung elaborated on the relationship among creation, documentation and criticism by referring to Interrupted Dream, a work he has continuously developed over the past five years, as a case study. Further, he showcased and analysed the video art in the performance and documentation of the work as an extended creation, and hence shared his views on the role of documentation in creative practice.

Actualising “Arts as Documentation, Documentation as Criticism, Criticism as Arts: Life and Times of Documentation as Criticism”, Yung has been documenting social events in the form of arts, reinforcing criticism by adapting documentation, and creating arts out of criticism. Eventually, he questioned how artists, despite cross-disciplinary settings, can find their own creative streak, and suggested they could experiment with different roles, rewrite their relationship of the ‘self’ and the confines that come with it in order to respond to the social environment.

Yung also recalled his experience of being appointed by the Hong Kong Government as a founder member of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC) and enlisting the help of representatives from the fields of Arts Criticism three decades ago. The establishment of the IATC(HK) shortly followed. Only through institutionalisation of art criticism, the independence of arts development can be maintained and sustainability ensured.

Also, he reflected that both arts and criticism feature openness. One must therefore re-examine the importance of critics and he urged artists to think how to fuse criticism into their works without compromising on concepts, in order to bring influence to the future of arts development.

After that, Alan Jones and Dr Nic Leonhardt, joint-presidents of SIBMAS, responded to Yung’s keynote lecture and concluded in the closing ceremony:- Jones believes that Yung’s speech had perfectly echoed SIBMAS’ emphasis on the importance of gathering global performing arts practitioners and researchers to act upon the matters of libraries and museums, while hoping this conference would provide an opportunity to pass on experiences and knowledge to the next generation; Leonhardt stresses the uniqueness of theatre as a live performing art form – a multitude of art forms presented on the stage and its multi-layered temporality are uniquely its own. That is why SIBMAS places great emphasis on research and sowing seeds of thoughts and possibilities.

Title: Arts as Documentation, Documentation as Criticism, Criticism as Arts: Life and Times of Documentation as Criticism

Speaker: Danny Yung (Hong Kong)

Date: 2024/06/27

Venue: Lecture Theatre, Henry Cheng International Conference Centre, Cheng Yu Tung Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong