This Practice-based Research (PbR) has been initiated from Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (Smithson, 1967) that coins and expands the dichotomous propositions from “Nature versus Culture” to Landscape, Cityscape, and Walkscape to Imagescape to Videoscape. Referring to the walking thoughts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Jean Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Richard Long (b.1945), Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), Brian Dillon (b.1969), and Rebecca Solnit (b.1961), walker/ rambler/ stroller/ flâneur / wanderer/ perambulator/ pedestrian (Loffler, 2017) would be explained and coined Walking as Creative Reflections and Outcomes for creative/ literary/ philosophical thoughts.
This PhD thesis mainly consists of THREE research aspects: “Walking Along the River/ On the Road/ In the City…” that demonstrate “Walking/ Flâneur” as a significant artistic-interventive tactics to further explain and illustrate as interceptive/ interactive/ interpretative praxis to contextualize “Towards the Dichotomies In-Between Nature-Culture”.
This video is also well demonstrated “container” as an “eco-social aesthetics”, and an interface of localism and globalism. It is a project reflecting my research in linking to thinking and re-thinking of our living condition rich of materialistic consumerism and globalism. Since “container” is one of the most powerful engine, effective/ efficiency means of transportation/ distribution/ transaction in the contexts of (post) industrial age, “@ Crossroads∥十字路口” is an exploration of the emerging, dynamic and fleeting nature of regional + global aesthetics and the human evolution of our collective physiological, psychological and cultural status.
Hong Kong Container Series is experimental paintings and audio/ video works showing “containers” as a cultural expression of capitalism and consumerism, which are two crucial aspects in my initiative research: how the Global Contemporary and the Global Economics makes the resurgence of New Pop Art. Containers are the most primitive, representative and pragmatic icon as “Campbell’s Soup Cans” from Warhol (1962) in the consumerism world for its readiness to be distributed and consumed. This idea could also be used to demonstrate the evolution of human physiological and cultural development. Containers’ aesthetics is a unique capitalism and consumerism phenomenon in Hong Kong. It entails the contradictory dialogue between Traditional vs Contemporary, East vs West, or New vs Old, and Production vs Consumption etc. It provides further the discourses in-between the locality and marginalized eco-cultural contexts, and reflects the flows of commodity under the spread of consumerism. In general, this cityscape of Hong Kong will become an artistic metaphor in the process of art production.