HONG KONG.- Para Site is presenting Ellen Pau: What about Home Affairs? Ellen Pau’s first retrospective set in Hong Kong. Showcasing multi-faceted creations from one of Hong Kong’s most influential and pioneering artists, the exhibition is curated by Para Site in-house curator Freya Chou and is on show from Saturday 8 December 2018 to Sunday 17 February 2019 at Para Site.
During her thirty years of practice, Pau has continually explored the possibilities of creating an alternative viewing experience through the lens, one that is concerned with the values inherent to technology and its modes of communicating in daily life. Ellen Pau: What about Home Affairs? features work from the late1980s to the present including selected single-channel video works, archives, and a series of unpublished photographs. By the early 1990s, Pau began to incorporate sculptural elements and ambient sounds into her video installations and developed a unique visual language that portrays subjectivity through digital media. Three major video installations, two series of Bik Lai Chu and Recycling Cinema, have also been reproduced for the first time in Hong Kong.
As well as pursuing her artistic practice, Pau is an active spokesperson advocating for and promoting the development of media art in Hong Kong. She co-founded Videotage, Hong Kong’s oldest artist collective, together with Wong Chi Fai, May Fung, and Comyn Mo in 1986. In 1996, she founded Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, an annual event that consists of exhibitions, conferences, seminars, and workshops. In 2014, Pau was appointed by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council as a representative of the Art Form Group in Film and Media Arts, and in the same year, she also served on the interim acquisition committee of M+ in West Kowloon Cultural District.
Pau's works have been extensively exhibited worldwide in film festivals and art biennials, including Hong Kong International Film Festival (1990), 8th International Film Festival for Women (Spain, 1992), Copenhagen Cultural Capital Foundation, Container 96 (Denmark, 1996), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Australia, 1996), Johannesburg Biennale (1997), Gwangju Biennial (2002), and among others. In 2001, She represented Hong Kong in the 49th Venice Biennale, where the Recycling Cinema was first presented, and it remains one of her most important works as of today.
Pau graduated from Hong Kong Polytechnic University with a diploma in Diagnostic Radiography in 1982 and has worked as a radiographer in Queen Mary Hospital since then. She made her first super-8 surreal film Glove in 1984 and produced a set of single-channel video works reflecting the political climate and social changes in Hong Kong.
