Artist Statement

Satellite Event: No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985

Two of Mo’s works hailing from the early 1990s grace the exhibition: ngo5 (1993) is a disorienting yet mesmerising short film that combines footage of impromptu performances shot in various locations (Mai Po Marshes in Hong Kong, New York City and San Francisco); while Can Fish See The Same Face Twice (1992) is an introspective, reflexive yet somewhat playful meditation on the nature of performance and spectatorship. A 1994 magazine review of these two pieces, quoted by the exhibition booklet, reads:
That the significance of the idiosyncratic imagery contained in the film is obscure and evidently highly personal does not detract from its poetic resonance. On the contrary, it is the evocation of such an esoteric quality that the film shares with much narrative avant garde cinema, carrying the viewer into its universe and demanding a reflexive and necessarily subjective response. [source: artradarjournal.com/2016/07/06/no-references-9-hong-kong-video-and-new-media-artists-part-1/]

• A co-founder of Videotage and a member of Zuni Icosahedron, Mo Man-yu’s experimental short films have won prizes at the Hong Kong Independent Short Film Festival and the Bruxelles International Film Festival. Mo’s film projects have been commissioned by the Goethe Institute, Hong Kong Baptist University and the Hong Kong Arts Festival, among others, and his works have been shown at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Asian American Arts Center in New York. [source: artradarjournal.com/2016/07/06/no-references-9-hong-kong-video-and-new-media-artists-part-1/]