Silas Fong’s ‘Stolen Times for Sale’ and the art of concealing

Hong Kong artist Silas Fong explores themes of subjectivity, disruption of the familiar, revelations and obscuring.

‘Stolen Times for Sale’ is a video installation/ performance in which the artist set up a video camera opposite a lift in a high rise building in Hong Kong. Although there was nobody waiting to use the lift to change levels, Fong caused the lift to stop, and for the doors to open. The video footage shows curious, sometimes indignant, faces looking out of the lift expectantly; their journey disrupted and their time wasted, albeit briefly, by an unknown stranger. Alongside the installation shown in 2008 at Artist Commune, Cattle Depot Artists Village, Hong Kong, which featured Fong’s performance, each viewer was invited to look through a ‘Catalogue of Stolen Times’, and given the opportunity to buy a fragment of the installation and therefore to possess a few seconds of the lift travellers’ time, stored on a disc. Once purchased, the fragment of film was removed from the overall installation and replaced by a black screen announcing the words ‘SOLD’ followed by the number of seconds and the price paid. The ‘blank’ screen remained for the same amount of time as the video extract it had replaced. The price of the frames depended on the duration, number of people, and the age of the people in the lift, although Fong was not explicit in his exact method of calculating of the cost.The affectivity of the work is at the crux of determining its value. The viewer’s engagement with the work creates its very concept. Fong sets in motion the idea that by engaging with the work fully, the viewer fulfils a particular role in the work itself. Each person who buys a fragment of ‘stolen time’, is simultaneously taking time away from the other viewers and changing the essential experience of the work. In the obscuring of the sold frames, Fong put into play a mechanism of taking and redistributing time. The piece dismantles itself in its becoming, and in the full emergence of its concept it conceals itself.

Within the artwork there are multiple references to revealing and concealing; the visual image of the lift door opening and closing, revealing different people, our awareness of the person who’s time has been ‘stolen’, as they look in vain for the absent person who has stopped the lift and finally in the gradual obscuring of parts of the video sequence itself as the piece is re-assimilated by its viewers. In this sense ‘Stolen Times for Sale’ generates further subjectivity. In his final book, ‘Chaosmosis’, Félix Guattari speaks of the subjectivity of an artwork:‘In studies on new forms of art (like Deleuze’s on cinema) we will see, for example, movement-images and time-images constituting the seeds of the production of subjectivity. We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation. We are actually confronted by a non-discursive, pathic knowledge, which presents itself as a subjectivity that one actively meets, an absorbant subjectivity given immediately in all its complexity.’ (Félix Guattari, ‘On the production of subjectivity’, ‘Chaosmosis’, 1992, p25)

We may regard an artwork to be, from in its very context and existence as a representative entity, a subjective and territorialised object, and for the artist, a visual sign of an idea. However, once it is open to perception, it is again de-territorialised. Fong’s ‘Stolen Times for Sale’ is structured and temporal and yet it is not ‘passively representative’. Its being-perceived enables it to be absorbed into other territories of experience, beyond possible interpretation. In ‘Stolen Times for Sale’ Fong explores this idea of subjectivity in the autopoietic nature of the work. Our assumed passivity as a viewer is disrupted and our being implicated in the work comes as a surprise.
15 Nov This entry was published on November 15, 2011 at 8:05 pm and is filed under art and chips. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

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