Making Moves: Interview with HomeShop

In 2008, amidst the clamor of the Olympics, HomeShop screened the athletic events in one of Beijing’s quiet, unassuming hutong alleyways. Neighbors and passersby were invited to partake in the spectacle and to further reflect upon its social impact. It was to be the first of many small public interventions initiated by the art space.

Now, five years later, the band of thinkers, writers and artists who have devoted themselves to the social politics and documentation of HomeShop’s surroundings are taking time to re-evaluate the project and determine where they are heading. 

 While on residency at Woofer Ten, one of Hong Kong’s own non-profit art spaces, HomeShop’s Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga spoke to ArtAsiaPacific about social movements in Hong Kong, wordplay and the challenges of collaborative art.  

Can you tell me about that peculiar device you were holding at the Haji Gallery opening last month?

EWH: Yes, that’s a steadicam I put together from random internet instructions. I went around the shops in the area to find the parts and made a rough version, which doesn’t work as ideally as it should. But since we’re working on a project where the density and the speed of the urban environment is important, it seems like the best way of shooting. It’s an obvious thing one notices in Hong Kong, and we want to bring that together with this other topic that we’re researching, the young people based around Yau Ma Tei who are involved in social movements.

Our starting point was a play on words. The term “social movement” works similarly in English and Chinese—the word for movement is the same for activity. It also came out of talks that we were having with [Lee Chun] Fung at Woofer Ten, who described Yau Ma Tei as being a kind of haven for young leftists and people involved in social movements. We found other people and groups in the area and it’s evolved from there.

FLH: The project is also about how desires and intentions translate into actions—a path that is not always that conscious or linear. This is what we’ve been working on with our project here, looking into what creates movement—what moves someone to act and how they go about it.

That’s interesting, so HomeShop’s frequent use of wordplay is an effort to break an idea down to its simplest components and then analyze the multiple meanings.

EWH: Yes, we are communicating with people in different ways. If you have an idea—something that moves you to act—it’s, as Fotini says, like wordplay: something understood at many different levels. Things don’t always need to be made manifest—they are difficult and complex. You find different languages to serve different formats.

For example, take the act of projecting something in public space. On the one hand, it’s the pure experience of finding the Olympics screening in a hutong that you can enjoy as an activity, as a spectacle. But it can also become an issue of addressing disparities of access, making it into a political question. It just depends on whether you’re interested in thinking of it in those political terms or not. And that’s how HomeShop first started. We were riding the wave of the Olympics and using it to think about the different ways that people were able to access the events. It allowed us to consider the ridiculous ways it was being fed to the locals.

What are some of the concerns of the artist-activists you’ve been interviewing in Hong Kong?

FLH: On a more abstract level, what seems to come up frequently is thinking about human relations, or rather, an attempt to rescue, create and maintain such relations outside of an overarching capitalistic framework. Given the density and high degree of regulation within the urban environment of Hong Kong, we’ve found that many of the issues at stake begin or end with spatial considerations—questions of land distribution, property rights, and/or the use of public space. 

What are some of their tactics?

EWH: Tactics vary from artistic interventions and work with communities to more direct engagement via protests and independent journalism or other forms of ideological critique. There seem to be both long-term agendas, such as creating and maintaining a community of like-minded people, as well as more immediate responses to current events, like the HIT dockworkers’ strike. With regards to that, for example, some of the groups we’ve been in contact with are organizing community fundraising to support the workers, issuing public statements and independent reportage on the situation, and even occupying the dock together with the workers.

What’s next for HomeShop and what are some of the lessons you’ll take that might be applicable to other projects or institutions?

FLH: In terms of lessons from Hong Kong, it’s actually been very helpful to spend time at Woofer Ten—an environment that’s in many ways similar to HomeShop—and use the time and space of the residency to reflect on what it is that we are doing in Beijing. It’s been quite fascinating to get glimpses into how another group functions, what brings people together, and how they attempt to engage with people passing by their storefront everyday. These issues, along with that earlier question about what moves someone, are currently on the table, too, as we are trying to imagine what shape the future of HomeShop can take. But that’s part of another long conversation.

EWH: One of the issues is that we tend to be so site-specific. You really can’t apply what we’re doing to another context. I have trouble translating ideas from certain projects somewhere else—or even talking about it elsewhere. The projects we’re doing require you to be present in order to process them affectively, but at the same time we’re writing and digesting—those are things that I think can be applied elsewhere. That’s what we’re attempting with this layered discourse at HomeShop.