Creative Forces: Beatrix Pang Sin-kwok
When asked recently what kind of art project she's working on, Beatrix Pang Sin-kwok's answer proves surprising.
When asked recently what kind of art project she's working on, Beatrix Pang Sin-kwok's answer proves surprising: independent publishing, rather than her familiar mediums of photography, video, installation or performance.
She displays two slender books with stapled bindings and only 20 pages - dummies of the two "zines" she's publishing this month.
For Pang, a zine is a work of art, not a mainstream mass product: it has a limited circulation (normally a few hundred copies) and it feels like a craft with its handiwork. But unlike many artworks nowadays, a zine is never a money-making tool (it has no advertisements), it's purely a channel of expression.
"It's all about how to present as many ideas as possible out of the most limited resources," the 36-year-old artist-publisher says of zine-making, which is usually low budget and therefore an ideal outlet for emerging artists.
The two zines, titled I Need to be Physically Healthy Because My Mind is Weak and I Dream Because I Don't, are co-published by Pang's Small Tune Press and young local talents Leung Yiu-hong and Hun Law (a.k.a. Siufung) respectively. The former is a series of photographs capturing everyday anxieties in Hong Kong, while the latter comprises a dozen illustrated English poems about trees in the city.
I Need to be Physically Healthy will be launched today (4pm, Basheer Design Books, 1/F, 439-441 Hennessy Road, Causeway Bay), while I Dream Because I Don't will come out on February 24 (3pm, Hong Kong Reader, 7/F, 68 Sai Yeung Choi Street South, Mong Kok). These self-publications, Pang says, celebrate an independent spirit. "It took me a long time to realise what independence is. When I look back on my works, I see myself struggling for years, wanting to break free."
One of them is Distance = Time x Speed, a video installation selected by the Hong Kong Art Biennial in 2005. It charts the artist's journey of self-discovery from Hong Kong to Norway, where she finished her master's degree in photography in the same year.