Hong Kong’s political changes reflected in artist’s video of musicians fighting each other to play a Beyond-based song while tied up
- The Day to Break the Silence, by Japanese artist Kato Tsubasa, mirrors the upheaval he has observed in the city over the past two years
- Part of an upcoming exhibition at the Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile’s, the piece also highlights different perspectives and distances between people
One of the highlights of a new exhibition exploring the love-hate relationships between different parts of East Asia is a bizarre video by Japanese artist Kato Tsubasa instigated during his residency at Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile (Chat) in February.
The video shows four musicians belonging to The Interzone Collective, a Hong Kong ensemble, bound together in an elaborate web of elastic ties in the pillared atrium of the former textile mill that houses Chat. The musicians are trying to play a selection of instruments that they can only reach by straining hard against the pull of other members of the group.
Similar to two earlier works from his series “Songs While Bound”, Kato has created a situation that evokes the tension between individuals and collectives.
In Kato’s Woodstock 2017, for example, four Caucasian men play the US national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, under similar restraints; the painful attempts by each musician to add broken notes to a stuttering performance look desperate, futile and a bit foolish. It is also a penetrating observation of the political climate in the US the year Donald Trump became president.
Just as Jimi Hendrix used his idiosyncratic, highly embellished guitar style at the original Woodstock Festival to mock the national anthem, the distortion of the still discernible and familiar tune in Kato’s version of Woodstock highlights the fragility of the union as the community increasingly disagrees on the limits of individual freedoms.
