Linda C.H. Lai

Linda LAI (LAI Chiu-han) received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU, and has been seeking meaning extension from the discipline to engage in new media and cultural investigations. Lai is a Hongkong-based inter-disciplinary artist and curator, and founder of the new media art group The Writing Machine Collective (2004- ). Her works have a strong concern for language and narrativity, grounded in a feminist sensibility that integrates critical theory, film theories and visual ethnography. She has a broad interest in image and text in the context of archiving. Her experimental video works have been exhibited in various experimental and documentary film/video festivals in Oberhausen, Berlin, Vienna, Birmingham, Barcelona, Paris, Hamburg, Jihlava (Czech Republic), Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, Taipei, Kaohsiung, Seoul, Macao, Hong Kong, and a few cities in the United States. Her digital interactive works include PUSH: the Quest for a Voice, In Search of a Body (2003-4, with Theresa Junko Mikuriya, Hong Kong Art Biennial), I See Where You Are in Central (2005, with Bryan Chung, Justin Wong and Alan Fong, Microwave International Media Art Festival), Who is Singing? - Donald, can you hear me? (2007, with Lawrence Choi, WMC_e2) and Scriptorium (2011, with Gary Ng). Of her various academic and sponsored publications, her personal favorites are two art-books. One is Crypto-glyph: Dialogues in Many Tongues in the Hidden Crevices of an Open City (2004) with Theresa Junko Mikuriya, a 288-page documentation of their 8 rounds of dialogues via photography and text. The book also carries her theoretical meditations on the dynamic relations between visuality and writing as a performance. Her next favorite is [Re-]fabrication: Choi Yan-chi’s 30 Years, the paths for interdisciplinarity in art (1975-2005) (2007), researched and edited for Para/Site Art Space's "Hongkong Artists in the 1980s" series. Her recent contribution includes the essay "Attempting a history of (new) media arts for Hong Kong: archaeology, literacy and education for artists" for the Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2007 (2008), a first essay of its nature to trace the fragments of events that would culminate in a history of Hong Kong's media art activities. Another essay, “What is the Writing Machine Collective (WMC)? – Many Beginnings,” has been contributed to a Videotage publication on Hong Kong new media art, Slow Burn, to be coming out soon. Her academic writings so far have a focus on urbanity, cultural memory and identity politics in cinema, as well as theoretical issues in cultural historiography and how to open up its horizons. Currently she is Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong's School of Creative Media, and Leader of Critical Intermedia Art.