At a talk at Dia Chelsea in March, Hong Kong-born, New York-based filmmaker, artist, and writer Tiffany Sia aptly characterized her new book as a “montage on paper.” On and Off-Screen Imaginaries collates six essays—several of which had earlier versions published in Film Quarterly and October—penned in the wake of the 2019–2020 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong, the subsequent passage of the 2020 National Security Law geared toward quashing dissent, and the arrival of new OFNAA Film Censorship Guidelines in 2021.
Writing a History of Hong Kong with Tears
In a new book and exhibition at Artists Space, New York, Tiffany Sia develops a ‘wet ontology’ of a city in perpetual crisis
Jeppe Ugelvig You’ve described the title of your recent book,
Too Salty Too Wet (Speculative Place, 2021), and your current exhibition at Artists Space, New York, ‘Slippery When Wet’, as your attempt to write a ‘wet ontology of Hong Kong.’ Can you explain what you mean by that?
Tiffany Sia I wanted to explore the invisible or less documentable characteristics that make up Hong Kong – how the knowledge of this place is stored, and how the city is made and unmade – through the notion of wetness as a conceptual tool. The city’s humidity describes its subtropical climate and geography, and when one lands in Hong Kong, this feeling is immediately palpable in the air. But a wet ontology also lead us to tears, responding to the call of Roland Barthes’s que