Yim Sui Fong

Against Step

In the nine-channel video installation, Against Step by Yim Sui Fong, a phantasmagorical image of a male dancer appears on a large-scale video projected on a floating retro-projection screen. His cathartic sequence of movements is based on an index of the bodily behavior of random people previously recorded by the artist while observing thousands of Hong Kong citizens in public space. Some of this recorded footage, done in poor mobile video quality, is played on loop in a set of TV monitors placed below the large projection. The dancer’s constant altering of movement patterns (his landing of each step, conscious adjustments, and manifestations of mental states) is a proposed expressive choreography to avoid the detection of ‘Gait Recognition’: the surveillance system that identifies and controls individuals based on their habitual motions and limb movements. Against Step is an exercise of non-predetermined movements, a continuous step/dance of resistance where the price of freedom, for possible escape from surveillance technology control, is based on trading one’s personality—to abandon one’s self. The meaning of surveillance in Hong Kong has radically shifted in the rapidly changing political environment. A police state exercising fear upon the community, driven by the territory’s security legislation after the massive public protests in 2019. A reality that later morphed into a dystopian medicalized control apparatus following Covid-19; numbing the bodies and psyches of its inhabitants. Though this work was made prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, it may well be read within Hong Kong’s inherent societal codes of hygiene and fear that have structured the territory’s collective memory.