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The Phantom Archives (2021-)

Developed alongside our (Lee Kai Chung + Shen Jun) research, The Phantom Archives initiative continuously archives sensuous and perceptual moments. The initiative departs from Lee’s artistic research series Displacement, also derives from our online archive StepBackForward.art that attempts to archive collective status in transitional times since 2020. The Phantom Archives publicises our encounters and ideas of our research to the best of our capacity, invites contributions and collaboration from friends, meanwhile conducts open calls for personal memories, stories and materials, hoping to include plural and reverberating voices. The archival index could be found at phantomarchives.com (designed by Oooo Studio), which will be further developed into dialogues, publications, collective walking tours and a physical project space. The first art book of this archive project, entitled No Misery, was published in 2022.

The phrasing of the Chinese title of The Phantom Archives, ‘虛無鄉’ (literal translation ‘voidness/nothingness’), is inspired by the Chinese translation of News From Nowhere (William Morris, 1890)[1], published by Shanghai Water Foam Bookstore in 1930. The original novel came out as a serial fiction on newspaper, gradually contouring a Utopian speculation from afar. From our perspective, this act of sending messages from nowhere makes faint noises of hope on the plane interface ought for the truth’. We borrow this phrase as a reminder of our initiative and mission.

Looking into the negative space of ‘historical truth’ and ‘professional archive’, The Phantom Archives pursues alternatives for the unarchivable and lived experiences, as our response to the sophisticated politics behind archive, history and publicness that are always our concern. Given the pattern of our work and life-living, The Phantom Archives is an ever-transiting, fragmented and archiving detour process, navigating the unspeakable histories and realities, the unsettled emotions and memories. Through researching, fieldwork, fictionalising, collaboration and open calls, we endeavour to give hints on perspectives in the interstices of institutional archive – performative memories, ambiguous narratives, identities in transition and entangled affect. We seek for an oblique path to the void of histories, letting go of polarisation between professional and amateur, objective and subjective, factual and fictional. In this sense, we expect the initiative creates its site of multi-temporalities intersecting past and present, here and there, whereby multiple possibilities reveal themselves. The perspective of The Phantom Archives also shifts from definitive ‘archive’ towards the processual ‘archiving’ as open, embodied movements. It concerns how abandoned lives in their own realities would find some sense of direction through seemingly soundless and powerless gestures.

[1] William Morris, News From Nowhere (虚无乡消息), trans. Lin Weiyin (Shanghai: Water Foam Bookshop, 1930).

The Phantom Archives

LEE Kai-chung performs artistic research on historical and historiography, systems, and ideology.

In his early years, Lee was inspired by the lack of proper governance over public records, then he develops his archival research methodology as his key artistic practice. Through research, social participation and engagement, Lee’s work resonates with historical narratives, which demonstrates that individual gesture as a transition between politics and art.

In 2017, Lee initiated a hexalogy of projects that are under the theme of “Displacement” – to take a departure from the socio-historical implication under the Pan-Asia context, the research-based series examines human dispersion, material circulation and their geopolitical relations. In order to experience both the mental and physical state of displacement, Lee has been constantly on the road since 2020. The first in the series, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) examines the material and ideological transition of public statues in Hong Kong; the second, The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20), scrutinizes the refuge in Hong Kong and Guangdong during the Japanese occupation period that later led to the Nanshitou Incident. The rest of the series are as follows: the third: Theatre Exile (2020-); the fourth: The Infinite Train (2021-); the fifth: The Longing Park (TBC); the final: Southern Swallows Fly Low (2020-2030). The series will also be represented as a social archive in 2022.

Lee’s ongoing research project Archive of the People addresses the political standing of documents and archives in the social setting. In 2016, Lee established the collective “Archive of the People”, which serves as an extension of his personal research to collaborative projects, education and publications.

In collaboration with curator Shen Jun, Lee founded stepbackforward.art and PhantomArchives.com in 2020 and 2022 respectively: the former is an online platform collecting artist archives, fragmented thoughts and artist methodology; the latter extends Lee’s “Displacement” series to a public domain, constituting an online archives that embraces public participation.

Lee received Altius Fellowship from Asian Cultural Council in 2020 and the Award for Young Artist (Visual Arts) from Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2018.

Recent exhibitions and projects include “Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur” (2021) (Winterthur, Switzerland), “Predicament” (2020) (Hive Center for Contemporary Art: Beijing, China), “Landskrona Foto” (2020) (Landskrona, Sweden), “The Deficit Faction” (2019) (Long March Space: Beijing, China), “Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018” (2018) (Seoul Museum of Art: Seoul, South Korea), “12th Shanghai Biennale: Proregress – Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence” (2018) (Power Station of Art: Shanghai, China) and “Artist Making Movement – Asian Art Biennial 2015” (2015) (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts: Taichung, Taiwan).

e: kaiclee13@gmail.com