Spiritual Instrument: The Work of Ho Siu-kee

Pamela Kember

I was rather surprised how little contemporary performance art existed in Hong Kong back in 1997 and felt it was, as a discipline, either ignored or sat unhappily on the periphery of a fairly young experimental art scene.

Therefore, when I was initially introduced to Ho Siu-kee's obsessive, playful and sometimes humorous world of mechanical contraptions through his videos and photography, I was instantly drawn to his highly sophisticated and range of performative actions.

Ten years on, and with so much current art involving reflections upon or re-enactments of performance art, it is time to revisit Ho Siu-kee’s diverse range of videos, performances, installations and documentation, works that are inspired by both analytical philosophy and the metaphysical.  Here is an artist who cultivates weightlessness because he understands the pulls and forces of gravity and more recently searches for a deeper engagement with gestures, a word derived from the Latin word gestura, meaning “bearing”, or “way of carrying”, in order to undertake his particular actions.

Consideration of the performer’s relationship to the audience or audience’s participation has not really formed a major part of Ho Siu-kee’s approach to his performance work, for it is not the gesture itself but the process, the interstices between gestures that interest him most. As Walter Benjamin explains with regard to acting, “a pause between gestures is essential because spacing the gestures apart from one another makes them ‘quotable’ or perhaps memorable”. Hence Ho’s range of assembled objects, photographs and illustrations engages the viewer in a myriad of ideas and motivational spaces, such pauses that connect with his inspirations and desire to delight as well as confuse our sense of the body in its relationship to itself as object and to the real.

His finger lamp is, for example, a rendering of an early light source that would be carried with a finger hooked through the handle of a glass, or brass holder. Ho Siu-kee presents a small beautifully crafted pear-shaped porcelain mould with a wick that fits into the palm and through to the right index finger--hidden from view to give the impression that the artist can channel fire through the body to allow the flame to dance on the fingertip.

The work reflects both Ho’s interest in the potential and problematics of what Merleau-Ponty in his writings on phenomenology suggests as one in which we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, or else what might be termed the indecipherable.  It is as if Ho’s work is both a place of passage and a place to live within, like a book’s cover, as his devises often resemble a “jacket”, one that can be seen to either restrict movement or incarcerate the figure, or else cover the body to protect it.

The artist also tries to integrate his work with his everyday life and his relationship to others, particularly his son whose image appears from time to time, as if the artist’s life from the stand point of what Merleau-Ponty describes as the “body scheme” here becomes a palimpsest, a layering of one image of the body over another, and also a genetic layering as such. Whether we can think of the body as a machine or a book, one can say look back to Mallarmé’s “The Book, Spiritual Instrument” where everything in the world exists as the book begins, either a white page or an empty desert. Yet if there is anywhere but the tabula rasa or blank page, there is also the idea that Ho is interested in the capacity to engage and instruct the viewer to consider our body as it differs across cultures.

His is the experiential body, one that the artist engages with as a ceaseless journey, yet one without conclusion. Thus he evokes the myth of Sisyphus, the tyrant punished by the underworld to undertake the same task of rolling a vast rock throughout all eternity. Seen either as a form of punishment or the absurd, it can be perceived as a human being’s futile search for revolt, or else to follow Camus’ philosophy, “the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

We can also see such patterns of human relationships, social interactions, symbols and rituals emerging in Ho Siu-kee's work, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, “I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it.  If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.” (Merleau-Ponty 1962)

With its reference towards being in the body, the metaphysical and the spiritual, Ho is also interested in such interpretations, those of the playful rendition of the body, one being in the world yet always in transition.  He has been able to traverse from the inner sanctum of the studio without an audience to touch upon some of the evocative, often uneasy tensions between human and mechanical forms and reveal to us new and surprising renderings of ancient or past narratives.

In Ho Siu-kee's own rendering of the Sisyphus myth, he replaces natural stone with man­made materials, a large sofa, shown in his video, that the artist relentlessly pushes uphill, and, suddenly jumping frames, the body is momentarily fragmented, lost and then emerges to continue its meaningless journey.  It is this pause between absence and presence, loss and recall that engages the viewer as we wait for the figure to emerge and will him towards an impossible summit. The work also hints at some of the dilemmas facing performance art in the fact that there is often no end result, nothing that we can hold on to or cling to afterwards; often there is repetition and re-enactment that force us to look at the old anew, to resume our connection with the past.

Ho Siu-kee plays with such object-subject relationships and with what Merleau-Ponty suggests as the “mind-body problem”, one that can be extended to his example of a phantom limb.  The idea that a patient’s experience of still having part of his/her body that has been severed suggests the possibility of not only the body as both subject and object but also of the body without pain, without realisation that there is a loss, an absence despite physical evidence to the contrary. In a number of Ho Siu-kee’s activities, whether his wearing an animal horn or carrying a slither of porcelain placed in the palm of the hand that supports a wick and appearing magician-like with a flame at his fingertip, such oscillations between absence and presence, between the real and the artificial, and the body and steel give us a sense that there is his experience of both freedom of movement, balance, support and co-ordination yet not without particular contradictions, those of restriction and confinement as well as tension.

Nonetheless his contraptions or devises, these metal coverings, move us towards a new body of understanding and the differing ways for us to relate to things and to each other. It is after all a characteristic of the Tao that “gravity is the root of lightness; stillness, the ruler of movement.”

Pamela Kember is an Independent curator and art historian.

性靈之器：論何兆基作品

Pamela Kember

林海燕譯

早在1997年，眼看香港當代行為藝術一片荒蕪，我感到十分驚訝，不禁認為在香港這個尚在萌芽階段的實驗藝壇中，行為藝術要不是備受忽視，就一定是呆在邊緣，怏怏不樂。

因此，當我首次通過何兆基的錄像和照片，得悉有這樣過癮幽默、叫人難以自拔的機動玩意，我馬上被他嫻熟、多元的行為動作深深吸引。

十年匆匆，行為藝術的反思與重現在當代藝術變得日益普遍，現在該是時候重新審視何兆基源於分析哲學與玄學的種種錄像、行為、裝置和文獻。何兆基這位藝術家深明地心吸力的原理，因而刻意經營無重狀態。最近，他更醉心於姿態舉動（英文「gesture」源出於拉丁語「gestura」一詞，意指「舉止」與「意態表現」）的探討。

在何兆基的行為藝術中，行為與觀者之間的關係或者觀者的參與程度所佔比重不大，因為他最感興趣的，並非姿態舉動，而是過程本身，也就是姿態舉動之間的縫隙。華特．班雅明（Walter Benjamin）在解釋演藝時說過：「姿態舉動之間不能沒有停頓，因為姿態舉動只有各自分開，才能夠供人『套用』，甚或令人難以忘懷。」同一道理，何兆基把物件、照片、幻象湊合起來，用無數的意念與行為空間攝住觀者的心神，讓其中的停頓接通作者的靈感與逗樂意圖，並同時攪亂身體究竟是物件還是血肉的觀感。

舉個例說，古人會用玻璃或黃銅製成燈盞，然後套在指上，把光源提着到處走。何兆基的指燈則是一個精緻的梨形瓷瓶，大小剛好可以整個拿在手裏，不讓人察覺，而附有的燭芯則沿着右手食指伸延至指尖，仿佛藝術家可以以身引火，讓火焰在指尖跳動。

從這件作品可以知道，何兆基要探討的是現象的潛力與局限，也就是梅洛-龐蒂在他有關現象學的著作中提到的，我們與超乎自身又或是莫名現象之間的關係。他的作品既是途經之地，又是長居之所，就像書套一樣。他的作品往往如同「外套」，可以看成是困住肉身，限制肢體活動，也可以是遮蔽身體，發揮保護作用。

何兆基亦嘗試把作品與自己的日常生活、與他人特別是兒子的關係結合起來。他兒子的模樣時會在他的作品中出現，仿佛他的生命已從梅洛-龐蒂所謂的「身體圖像」，變成重寫後仍留有原文痕跡的羊皮紙，身體影像互相重疊，而且是基因上的重疊。不管身體是否可以當作機器或書本，我們大可以回想到馬立美（Mallarmé）「書是性靈之器」的說法，也就是世間萬物都像是一本書的開端、一張白紙或空空如也的沙漠。不過，哪怕只有白紙（tabula rasa）一張，何兆基都熱中於探討如何吸引、引導觀者從不同文化角度出發，思量自己的身體。

何兆基的身軀是充滿實驗意味的身軀，可供作者踏上永無休止、沒有終點的旅程。於是，他借來了希臘神話，讓人聯想到暴君西西弗斯遭冥界懲罰，要一次又一次地把巨石推上山，直到永永遠遠。懲罰也好，荒謬也好，這可以看成是人類妄圖反抗，要是套用加繆的哲學思想，便是「掙扎本身已足以填滿人的心靈。西西弗斯該是開心的。」

何兆基的作品也充滿人際交往、象徵及儀式，正如梅洛-龐蒂所說，「我不是在自己身軀前面，而是在裏面，或該說我就是它。如果說對自己身軀的觀感是可以演繹的話，那麼，身軀就在自我演繹。」（梅洛-龐蒂。1962。）

所謂人在肉身裡，不論是形而上的還是精神上的，何兆基都鍾情於以戲謔手法演繹身體，演繹雖然身在塵世，卻又無時無刻不是過客。他能夠在畫室這種沒有觀眾的私家重地，誘發人與機器之間的張力，叫人產生共鳴之餘，往往又會感到不安，並藉以對古代述說作出令人驚喜的嶄新詮釋。

在何兆基的重新演繹下，錄像中要竭力向上推的不再是西西弗斯神話中的天然石塊，而是一座人造的大沙發，畫面接着突然跳格，身軀一時間支離破碎，不知所終，然後又再次現身，繼續那毫無意義的旅程。深深吸引着觀眾的正是這有與無、遺忘與回憶之間的停頓，大家都在靜候主角再次出現，再次闖向那無法到達的頂峰。作品亦隱含行為藝術面對的兩難局面，就是往往沒有結果，也沒有可供日後憑藉的東西，有的往往只是重複、重現，迫使我們重新審視舊有的東西，重拾與過去的聯繫。

何兆基把玩的是主客關係，也就是梅洛-龐蒂所謂的「心身問題」。這從梅洛-龐蒂引用的烏有肢體例子得到印證，就是病人感到截去的肢體仍然存在，可見身軀既可是主，也可是客，而且縱使實情相反，身體也沒有痛楚，並未察覺有所缺失。何兆基的一些行為，不論是戴着獸角，或是把附有燈芯的瓷器拿在手中，像變戲法似的，讓指尖冒火，都是迴蕩於有無、真假、血肉鋼鐵之間，讓我們感到他行動自如、平穩協調，但同時卻受到牽制、氣氛緊張。

然而，何兆基的玩意，那些金屬外套，卻引領我們趨近嶄新體會，領悟人與人之間、人與物之間的不同共鳴。畢竟，道的表徵正在於「重為輕根，靜為躁君」。

作者為獨立策展人及藝術史學者。