‘Suki Chan lives and works in the UK and her Interval records with loving observation details of her grandmother’s Hakka home in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Through a childhood song under flickering lights, she brings alive a new space that is neither the past she seeks nor the present realities.’

Chang Tsong Zung, curator, Hanart TZ Gallery

Interval explores the concept of origins and of re-connecting with a place that Suki feels distanced from both in time and geographically. It investigates a paradox - in our attempts to find an origin, we often find ourselves in a new ambivalent place: a place neither where we departed from, nor the anticipated destination.

Suki made a trip to her old village in Sai Kung, Hong Kong to explore and record, using time-lapse, her old family home, now dilapidated and awaiting demolition. She stood still in the space and filmed the way light and shadows changed as the day progressed. This was repeated over a number of days with different perspectives of the interior of the house. The resulting time-lapse sequences show streams of light seeping through cracks of the tiled roof and highlighting different areas of the textured and crumbling walls; and a tiny speck of light eventually revealing itself as a light bulb. The moving images progress at a slow, mesmerising pace and then suddenly flash and disappear before our eyes, sometimes too fast for us to register their resemblance. In between moments of darkness, surfaces appear like imaginary oceans and continents and globules of light seem to drift and float.

Credits:
Camera - Suki Chan
Post-production by Andrew Hunwick
Soundtrack - Li-Chuan Chong

Commissioned by Asian Art Space Project, Plymouth Arts Centre and Mercy. Funded by Arts Council England.

Distributed by Lightcone, Paris, France. www.lightcone.org