Suki Chan's Interval, Robert Clark

As I write this, in the early summer of 2009 in Northern UK, I am awaiting the arrival in the skies outside my hilltop window of the swifts.  Having mysteriously found their way from Southern Africa, their sudden swooping signals summer’s true advent. It’s an annual spectacle of utter wonderment, a spectacle I feel sure would appeal to the artist Suki Chan.

Chan’s art touches on recurrences of ephemeral wonders. It is lyrical and evocative. It points at experiential possibilities beyond the workaday world of consumerist capitalism and creative possibilities beyond the declamatory competitiveness of the contemporary artworld.  Her video installation Interval II is a plaintive elegy to personal loss and the passing of life and time. It is also a celebration of human passion and natural regeneration. There’s the deep melancholy of mortal awareness and then there’s the sheer sense of delight at nature’s defiant regenerative rhythm. The work sets up poignant tensions between images of our manufactured environment and images of natural forces as wide ranging as the seas and the stars. It’s a work of near numinous visual poetry and I haven’t seen quite the like of it anywhere before.

The scene is set with film of billowing clouds above a mountainous and forested landscape. The speeded movement of the passing clouds and the quivering of the crepuscular light create an aura of dreamlike uncertainty and anticipation. This tremulous rhythm fluctuates enchantingly throughout the work, accumulating an atmosphere of exquisite vulnerability. As one becomes hypnotically adjusted to one sequence, the scene shifts to a quite different perspective onto some in-between place, some site on the edge of recognition, a further ambiguous enticement. 

There’s an interior close-up of curtains. There’s the sweeping circular outline of a Chinese rammed earth roundhouse, appearing against the nocturnal sky like a ruined amphitheatre. There’s the skeletal silhouette of a ruined pier. Chan’s use of the seaside pier is typical of her approach. Here’s a structure sited right on the dividing perimeter between the deceptive security of manufactured architecture and the ultimately unknowable organic beyond of the ocean. This, of course, is the seaside seen after the holiday-makers have long since departed, when the wet and the wind and the weather have once again reclaimed the edges of our safety. The soundtrack shifts from gull cries and seaside bustle, to the haunting distant barking of a dog, to the creaking and groaning of the pier’s ironwork tensioned by the churning pressure of the tides. As the scenic light trembles, the sound comes in swooning drifts. 

These tend to be the kind of scenes and sounds used by more mainstream filmmakers to set the background context for the foreground narrative. But there is no straight narrative or dialogue here, no interacting of protagonists. One must recognise the fact that this is not a film as such, but a video installation. Chan infiltrates spaces with her filmic evocations. She transforms the space and atmosphere into which the viewer enters. This is surely what good installation is all about: the recomposition of the elements of a space so that the presence of the space itself becomes the work, more than the separate objects which are installed within it. If there are protagonists here they are the viewing occupiers of the installation space itself. Chan conjures a reverie into which we ourselves are invited to enter. Thus the viewer might be quite literally possessed by Interval II. The arrangement of film into triptych format throughout invites an engrossed contemplation of iconic significance. Viewing it is a ritualised experience. The film loops, its development becomes spatial rather than linear. Chan makes space special.

As the fading grandeur of ruined architectural structures is contrasted with the stunning aesthetics of natural form and force, two central images recur. Firstly there’s a swarming flock of starlings silhouetted against the half-light like so much magically animated black ink calligraphy. The triptych format stretches their flight out into an almost hallucinatory panorama. In the text for a past work, Imagine  Space Above Our Heads, Chan observed “I would like to think it was birds that inspired us to challenge our own physical limitations thousands of years ago. To take a step towards a dream – a dream that must have at one time seemed impossible …” She follows this with remembrances of lying awake as a child and imaginatively projecting scenes onto the patternings of the ceiling “… a little like looking up at the sky and watching clouds.” This inclination to an almost visionary wonderment lies at the essence of Interval II. The starlings are wonderful birds, but also maybe metaphoric self-reminders of Chan’s migration to the UK from faraway Hong Kong, where she spent the formative years of her childhood.

The second recurring focus of Interval II is that timelessly illuminating  reminder of our place in the larger scheme of things: the night sky. It is to Chan’s considerable credit as a video artist that she brings the glimmerings of the night sky to life. There is no cringing air here of sentimental clichés. The aforementioned text from Imagine Space Above Our Heads concludes with a relevant passage: “In one lifetime, we sense and know only a minuscule portion of the universe. Look at it another way, even a minuscule portion of this universe will last a lifetime … Where do we want to go?”  In an artworld so often infected by tedious theoretical indulgencies and self-regarding academic posturings, few are the contemporary art practitioners who come near to Chan’s rare textual sensitivities. This is writing as art, rather than writing about art. Its purpose is to further widen the creative range, rather than to enclose it in prosaic analysis.

The stars seduce one into the depthless darkness. The moon swoops slowly below the horizon. The scene is simply beautiful, and almost scarily so. As Chan has mapped out the interface between the land and the sea, here she maps the interface between the earthbound and the heavenly.

As I finish writing this, I still await my beloved swifts. What if this year, for once, they were to fail to return? The thought is virtually unthinkable. Suki Chan’s art makes us wonder in more ways than one. It enables us to treasure the wonder of the world through daring to suggest the dreadful cost of the loss of such wonderful phenomena.

Robert Clark
Artist and writer

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