Kotodama
Visual Arts
Description
Description
This exhibition discusses the mechanisms and idiosyncrasies of language, positing that the disappearance of languages endangers human culture as a whole. The Asia-Pacific region has one of highest language diversities in the world, boasting over 1500 languages, about a third of the global total. In the past century, many languages around the world have ceased to exist, and currently there are many more that are endangered or vulnerable. In recent decades, the number of speakers of many languages in mainland China and Taiwan has dramatically dwindled. Cantonese in Hong Kong remains one of the most robust Chinese languages, but Mandarin is becoming ever more present in the city, backed by government policies.
Presented in the exhibition, the works by Kim Woojin, Nortse, and Wu Jiaru recount the aftermath of language policies in the Sinosphere since the modern era. As different governments push their national language agenda in education and media policies, other languages are threatened, along with the many traditions related to those languages. Okui Lala, a Malaysian artist of Chinese descent, embarks on a journey of reconstructing the idea of mother tongue in the complex linguistic landscape of her country. Tang Kwok-hin talks to the younger generation in his Hong Kong family about an education for the future. Evoking the role of languages in the preservation and dissemination of mythologies, Hsu Chia Wei follows a deity whose devotees struggle to keep the faith alive through rituals and songs. Works by Danh Vo and Wong Hoy Cheong employ texts to reveal how language was used by colonisers to exert control over the newly conquered. Susan Hiller focuses on several extinct, endangered, and revived languages around the world.
Note：This event record is compiled from "Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2018" published by Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Info
Indoor