The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Video is the primary medium of Ellen Pau's work, and although in recent years she has become involved with installation art, her installations usually incorporate video as a major ingredient. After a brief period of experimentation with Super 8, Ellen Pau turned to video because of that medium's greater intimacy, and because her interest is more particularly in the moment of editing than the moment of shooting. Video enables this focus on editing in a way that Ellen Pau feels comfortable with; slow-motion and repeat are common elements of her visual syntax. Documentary or other realist modes are eschewed: Ellen Pau shifts our attention from the given content of the images by her manipulation of them. Nam June Paik subverts the information content of his imagery by a strategy of overload, but Ellen Pau achieves the same end by moving in the opposite direction. Her minimal and often slow-moving videos foreground rhythmic and formal concerns, and explore poetic dimensions. A millipede's movements across a surface, for instance, becomes an abstract study of line in space in What the Body Doesn't Remember 1993, whilst in Blue 1990, a train moving horizontally across the screen, with occasional 70 I ARTISTS: EAST ASIA Drained II 1989 Video 5'40" glimpses of the space behind, becomes a study in visual rhythm with which the musical soundtrack interestingly interacts. Although formal qualities are foregrounded by the manipulation of imagery at the editing stage, this does not mean that Ellen Pau can be easily considered as some kind of formalist. New meanings can emerge through the formal manipulation to replace those which are being evacuated. For instance, in a video produced tor inclusion in a theatre production, Destiny Travels Limited, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Studio Theatre, 1996, Ellen Pau manipulates an airline safety procedures video so that the movements of the stewardess are 'sinicised' and come to resemble those of a tai chi practitioner. In a video included in an untitled installation at the Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong, 1993, the slowing down of scenes of a demonstration makes the voices of the demonstrators sound like those of animals, implying comment on the event taking place. In Song of the Goddess 1992, the artist's viewpoint is also introduced with a degree of obliqueness, and this approach seems eminently suitable to its subject, a close relationship between two women which was never, at least publicly, acknowledged as being lesbian in character.The two women were well-known Cantonese opera actors and movie stars who frequently acted together (one taking male roles, the other female). Ellen Pau starts with sequences taken from their films which show them together, but then introduces more personal material she has shot herself that depicts two women sharing a bath, one soaping the other's back. The slow-motion presentation of the scenes of the two stars together gives us an opportunity to re-examine their interactions with hindsight; in search of clues as to the nature of their offscreen relationship. Installation art has become very popular in Hong Kong in recent years, and Ellen Pau has participated in this trend. Her works are generally quite site-specific, often beginning with an investigation of the site and its history. Projected images are more frequently used than monitors, and she commonly chooses to work with a space which is closed off from its surroundings. The video in an installation piece will usually present a single image sequence only, and a human body in motion (most commonly her own) is the dominant subject. Before starting to make videos, Ellen Pau was involved with performance herself, and has had a long association with the avant-garde dance collective Zuni Icosahedron, whose minimalist aesthetic is similar to her own. In the video installation Pik-Lai Chu (Dressing-room: Pledge) 1994, Ellen Pau makes use of front and back images of her own body projected side by side.The image was recorded in the location in which it was projected, and in response to the original function of the space as a theatre dressing-room, she has stripped down to her underwear. The movement of the figure in the confined space conveys a feeling of entrapment, and the piece may be taken as part of the artist's attempt to comment on the 1997 handback of Hong Kong to China. David Clarke, Universityof Hong Kong, Hong Kong