Yau Ching

Biography

Probing and formally innovative, the work of Hong Kong-born artist Yau Ching strategically pulls apart the conventional relationship between spectator and text. Inverting the roles of "tourist" and "native," Yau Ching rigorously interrogates the politics of representation, particularly in relation to questions of gender, exile, and cultural translation. Difference emerges as a core theme in her work, invoked and challenged by the incongruities of public and private memories.

Yau Ching's imagery is complexly layered, moving from diaristic documentary video to richly processed found footage. Issues of language and the limitations of expression are foregrounded, as she draws upon diverse sources, from personal memoirs and "video letters" to historically disparate literary and theoretical works. Fragmented voices and texts point to the failure of language to fix identity, and to the meanings that can be created through silences. Through overlapping and disruptions, she creates a kind of visual and aural stuttering that echoes the counter-discourse of the outsider. The subjects of Yau Ching's video works seem perpetually caught between visibility and invisibility, and the imagined or forgotten memories of a home that no longer exists.

Yau Ching was born in 1966 in Hong Kong. She gained a B.A. from the University of Hong Kong, receiving the Urban Council Literary Award (Hong Kong). She moved to New York in 1990 to study at the New School for Social Research and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York; University of California, San Diego and the University of Michigan.

She has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Roothbert Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, Hong Kong Arts Development Council; Lyn Blumenthal Fund for Independent Video; Astraea Foundation Grant; the Asian Cultural Council; and Image Forum, Japan. Yau Ching has had residencies at Video In, Vancouver, Canada; Harvestworks, New York; and Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Her tapes have been screened at numerous museums, galleries, and festivals including the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; the London Film Festival; Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris; the World Wide Video Festival in The Hague, The Netherlands; the Asian American International Film Festival, the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Yamagata International Film Festival, Japan, the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and the Hong Kong International Film festival. She lives in Hong Kong and New York City.