Hong Kong Art Week offered a dizzying array of artistic endeavours across its flagship events last month. Yet away from the headline-grabbing happenings along the harbourfront and the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, the city’s artists are working quietly to make meaningful contributions to the art scene.
Andy Li San-kit
Born in 1994, Andy Li San-kit is an experimental filmmaker and lens-based media artist who works with analogue rather than digital tools. His affection for his chosen medium stems from his time in Hamburg, Germany, where he attended university and went treasure-hunting through the city’s flea markets, discovering old cameras and photographs along the way.
Compared to more modern and speedy – not to mention, disposable – digital photography, film comes with many constraints. It is costly and time consuming to develop the final image. Li embraces these obstacles, making them part of his own rules and conditions for creating art, and poetically embedding them in each photo sculpture and installation.
Li’s Film Ruler (2023) is a deceptively simple roll of 16mm film stretched out across the walls of a room. Upon closer inspection, one notices the scale markings on each frame, turning the straightened film into a ruler constructed by the number of frames. By measuring a physical space, Li attempts to transform the role of film from a time-based medium into a physical, utilitarian tool.
Time, space and painstaking labour come together quietly yet play distinct roles in Li’s meticulous installations. He rigorously questions and critiques those roles and the very meaning of image-making in his work, often using the tools of the trade, like cameras and projectors, to do this.
