Can you tell me a bit more about what RoCH stands for..

It stands for Return of the Condor Heroes, and that’s the title of the second part of The Condor Trilogy of novels by Louis Cha, also known as Jin Yong, first published between 1957 and 1961 as a Hong Kong newspaper serial. The novels were soon adapted for film and TV – part of a resurgence, an explosion, of wuxia – historical, heroic martial arts fiction, a genre that goes back to at least the early 20th century.

Is it a kind of martial arts pulp fiction?

Some would call it pulp fiction, some literature – there’s a lot of discussion over how to define, how to translate, wuxia. You could say that, broadly, the martial arts genre encompasses wuxia and kung fu – as specific filmic sub-genres – with wuxia related more to swordplay, fantasy, and kung fu the more ‘realistic’ fist-fighting style.

It’s extremely popular, and pulp fiction in that it started out as serialised in disposable, daily, throwaway form. But it’s taken seriously as literature - there’s an academic discipline around Jin Yong’s work – Jinology.

Like Charles Dickens…

Yes... There have been over 40 different adaptations of the trilogy, across film and TV, and more recently video games and comic books - consumed by communities beyond Hong Kong and China, and other sites of production, including Taiwan and Singapore.

The legends themselves are set in the 13th and 14th century, but is there something particular about the time the novels were written – the late 1950s?

Wuxia, as a term, came into play in relation to literature and cinema from the early 20th century and it’s very much bound up with the rise of cinema itself. Traditionally, the genre features a male or female xia or knight-errant, who lives by a heroic chivalrous code, and is often seen to inspire, or speak to dreams of nationhood and Chinese identity, but certainly, some of the thinking around new wuxia of the late 1950s and, 1960s looks at it through the lens of Hong Kong and social tensions to do with colonial relations, and the question of what identity and nationality meant for colonial subjects in Hong Kong.

Between the different parts of Jin Yong’s trilogy, there are shifting tensions, constantly, between patriotic themes and the desires of the individual.

Thinking about motifs, themes and concerns that recur in your work..there’s a clear and rigorous intellectual approach, but always balanced with a sense that the work itself, and how it offers itself to the viewer, has to remain engaging and open to further investigation. But something you returned to in different works is dancing. There are the archive clips of social dancing in NEW / REEL – that came out of a residency at the Media Archive for Central England – as well as DIY Ballroom ... the dancing lessons as part of Golden ...

And then, your work with gymnasts and sports – Lightness – a more abstracted movement – so the body and movement is something you come back to..

Yes, intuitively rather than in an overly intellectualised way. The first thing to say – and perhaps this is the case with many artists – is that there is always a gap between the way in which I conceive of and research a project, and what actually materialises through the process of making and exploring.

It’s interesting to realise that the figure is something I come back to... and I’d say, yes, there is a conscious return to bodies, and the question of how one represents another without objectifying. I’m not interested in the spectacle per se, but as much in looking at how one re-frames that presentation, and in oneself as spectator in relation to both spectacle and other spectators – to highlight a certain dynamic, relational limit.

One of the expectations I have of art is that it can bring me back to myself – and that seems a basic interest in your practice?

Yes, a coming back to oneself. This question of where one starts from and how one encounters another body, another subject, whether that’s via mediated material or watching gymnasts, athletes training, live… The question is how does one ‘relate’, and how does one re-present the relation or set of relations in a way that that leaves space for a complexity and a ‘not knowing’.

I think it’s about wonder, in a way, isn’t it?

Yes...

It seems to me that your interest shifts. With Lightness there is a wonder that a human gymnast can move in this way, and in looking at dancing, a beauty and lightness and exhilaration. But Faster, Higher – your ‘Olympics’ film – you begin to reference other kind of ideals. And RoCH Fans and Legends, where the physicality and the lightness is not a natural, possible thing, the interest is in something much more metaphoric?

Yes, though I feel like I’ve barely started to think about this! I'm conscious that you could trace a trajectory – of how the body becomes lighter and lighter, more fantastical almost. But then there are also the questions, “How am I seeing this? How am I encountering it?” And, to go back to the question of the body, it is also about how that visual encounter is a bodily experience too. Where am I then placing myself and another spectator, another audience? And the way scale and sound and the multiplicity of images “plays you”, makes you “play” the work in a sense.

I wondered how the elevation / levitation / flying is written about in the books?
I have to confess that I’ve only just begun to read a translation of one of the books, his very last novel. Very few of Jing Yong’s works have been translated into English. I’ve been really surprised at the language. It is a bit Dickensian, like you suggest – quite ornate and careful and elaborately set up, and of course epic.
I wondered about the leap from reading about someone flying to film and television showing someone flying.

That’s the interesting thing, and of course there are so many leaps, in terms of translations, between the word on the page and the newspaper strip and the novelisation and scripts for TV or film…

Reading comic book versions of the trilogy for example, I’ve been struck by that mutual relationship between television and manga. It’s very hard to say whether this kind of framing and editing is influenced by television or the other way around.

And films will have had their storyboards. But it also goes back to the cultural context. When we look at images of gymnasts we simply wonder at the body, but with the Condor films, there is a whole other depth of notions of freedom and transcendence and liberation. I don’t that’s too cumbersome an interpretation.

I think you're right. In Faster, Higher I try to contextualise that wonder, and wonderful and awe-inspiring movement, in relation to national and cultural rhetoric and ideologies.

Lightness tried to do something else with that movement… I think a key difference with Lightness is how that movement is much more explicitly framed in relation to the individual’s blood, sweat and tears.

So there are these concurrent narratives of endeavour that are conveyed verbally through the interview excerpts, but also visually through the sheer repetition of drills, and my following these athletes over 18 months.

With Trilogies, I hope that the sense of the leap between the concept of movement, an idea of movement – the idea of a leap and its representation – is evoked at both a literal level and at the level of the televisual language and stylistics of movement – which relates to changing technologies and a certain…well, yes, I guess a kind of wuxia aesthetics.

Having watched so much of this material, clearly there were a lot of trampolines in use in the ‘70s! And then the creeping in of visual effects through the ‘80s, and then you get more wire-work or wire fu from the ‘90s onwards.

I think the question of the leap between the textual representation and visual representation – those shifts in visual language, and the proliferation of translations – is very much what the work, Trilogies, is about.

The research is a substantial part of your process – the investigation and the gathering of stuff. Not just the material or the context of an archive, but the process - the research, the listing, categories, cataloguing. So the documenting of your research for RoCH Fans and Legends is something you must enjoy?

Yes, well, I think you know I like my systems and categories! And inventing new ones where the existing ones seem to fail…

Yes – it’s a critical engagement and an imaginative engagement. I wondered about that as a strategy?

A general thing about archives and my interest in them is how they always make visible something and leave something else invisible. They are always hierarchical. I'm not sure whether it really qualifies as research, some of what I do, but there you go.

It counts as collecting, doesn't it?

A magpie kind of collecting, here and there. I’ll read this, I’ll read that. In the process of reading around the subject, I find myself drawn to what’s not in the narrative, what isn’t written about, what isn’t represented, or made visible in any way. In part, RoCH Fans and Legends speaks to a certain absence in historical narratives, if you like; what I’ve been thinking of as a kind of translocal experience.

What do you mean by translocal?

Wuxia film and cinema tends to be talked about in transnational terms, as transnational products made for global transnational spectators. By translocal I'm trying to distinguish between the high budget, mass media-generated, and mass media mediated, cultural objects made for mass consumption on the one hand and the, if you like, degraded versions of those films that get distributed in other ways.

So the translocal for me – crudely speaking – might describe an informal connection between one person, here – with another person, there – consuming and sharing versions of the same material by various dislocated, fractured modes of distribution. I'm thinking for example about how The Condor Trilogy arrived at our doorstep – when I was growing up in the 1980s.

Bootleg videos in plastic bags, delivered to our home, via a local network of first generation Chinese immigrants who maintained regular connections with Hong Kong. So these videos were being flown or shipped over weekly and we would get our weekly fixes of the latest popular Hong Kong drama.

That’s what I mean, to some extent, by the translocal. These networks, and modes of reproduction, that were largely invisible. Now their nature and speed has changed with technology. So later on, in the ‘90s, you could get Hong Kong Chinese TV via satellite at certain hours of the day. And a few years later, it’s 24 hours, and a few years after that, it seems like everything is available all the time.

My way of accessing all these versions of the trilogy has been online. And it was about three years ago that I realised that The Condor Trilogy that I had first encountered in the early ‘80s – and kind of parked there, with certain memories and experiences – was still very much present, circulating, with all these other versions.

I was amazed that I could find clips and old episodes and watch it again. I’d resigned the experience to something that I could never see again - because those VHS tapes are long gone, taped over with something else, etc. I felt I was being really slow in catching up with the implications of what this represented.

But I think we’re all slow in catching up with that, aren’t we? The way in which we think about being human, the idea of being able to retrieve that personal cultural engagement, so it’s not memories anymore, it becomes contemporary again.

Yes, and I'm really interested in that compression. The speeding up of technology, and the speeding up of archival processes. How anyone, increasingly, can readily archive, albeit badly, with little idea of how to future proof... The idea that the past is past; that was then, it’s lost, it’s over there... It’s quite astounding that what might have been considered lost 30 years ago, 20 years ago, suddenly reappears because somebody has retrieved and bothered to digitise it and then upload it.

And in relation to that process of reclaiming, speeding up, compression, it’s appropriate that the trilogy is something written in the late 1950s, about the 13th Century, and the ongoing reference and re-making. As you were saying, the re-playing. The way things tumble over each other.

One of the things that I think happens with that compression and the catching up is that it’s no longer possible to think about past, present and future as simply having a linear relation. We’re doubling up on ourselves all the time. The cliché about the past catching up with you doesn’t really work anymore; it’s not behind you… we’re doing the catching and chasing. We replay, and if we're replaying it, then we’re making it present again, we’re making the ‘past’ into our ‘now’.

Which is one thing on a personal level but when that becomes a wider cultural thing, then it becomes a dead end for culture, I guess. And in Trilogies, there’s a compression...

Yes – I’ve taken from these 13 different adaptations only the moments of lightness, if you like. All the moments where a body, a figure, is defying gravity; not quite weightless, but where there is something fantastical in their movement. It might be subtle; it might be absolutely laboured with flashing lights and various effects.

The making of the work is very much part of the process of discovery too. So I'm only now, having nearly finished the edit, experiencing or beginning to experience for myself the effects of these accumulated cuts, the compression of all these moments.

That repeated lightness… without the coming to earth.. it must make you hold your breath when you’re watching it. What you said about playing the viewer – provoking anticipation that never resolves.

I am wondering how it’s going to read. All those moments of wonder and thrill which, if you're watching episode by episode, are only a part of something larger. I'm giving you just those moments – 400 or so hours of trilogies compressed into a single hour across three screens. Possibly creating some quite uncomfortable viewing.

Well, it’s magical and exhausting as well at the same time, isn’t it?

It could be exhausting, it could be nauseating, it could be…! The beauty of a fleeting moment may become awful – or anodyne – in its accumulation.

In the drawing, animation and collage works you’ve been reducing characters to outlines, and covering up, to erase actors’ features and remove identity. Was this simply a formal, technical process that you were working through?

With the drawings I collected all the publicity images that I could find relating to the different versions. And yes, being less interested in the actors and the celebrities for whom that particular version might have been a vehicle, and more interested in the recurrence of a certain kind of iconic stance, or the styling of a heroic figure, male or female – who also becomes quite abstract and androgynous.

Formality and form, I guess?

Yes. Looking at the repetition of versions through one particular moment or mechanism, if you like. But on another level, they're kind of fan drawings. One of the other things I collected was fan drawings of various actors, idols and I hadn’t done anything with these yet.

But I desperately wanted to make some drawings myself, and I started on various things and found myself going back to these covers and just tracing them, because there is something interesting, I think, in the act of tracing and the act of repetition. As I was repeating these figures, actually it was someone else that pointed out to me that they kind of recalled that disco lag effect.

That Top of the Pops thing?

Yes, that Blame It On The Boogie effect. I really like that association, because one of the phrases that keeps popping into my head in relation to how we increasingly engage with multiple, global, popular cultures, is “cultural lag”. This feeling of being slightly out of step with, or out of time within, culture or cultures.

It might be something that you experience as a tourist, physical or virtual, or it might be something that you experience in relation to whatever the current trends are, a generational schism maybe. For me, I think I first started thinking about cultural lag in relation to being in England and yearning for Hong Kong.

Waiting for that delivery every week?

Yes, absolutely, so quite literal in a sense.

How are you exploring that in the drawings?

To be quite frank, I don’t know if any of the work does any of the things, addresses any of the questions that I ask myself when I start a project! I think that’s for others to determine. Is that a bit of a cop out?

No!

Yes!

I think you can start with a bunch of questions and then you’ll start making work, exploring materials, and you're not necessarily sure where you're going with it or if it is going to get you to any kind of an answer, or whether the questions you ask yourself are red herrings. They're a way to get going.

I think the cop out is if you say you don’t have any questions in the first place.

Actually I think there is something about the layering and the rotoscoping of the drawings - again it’s a bit like suspended, insistent, continuing lightness. It never resolves. It’s movement that’s always on its way to something but you never get there.

The key thing for me is that all these barely invoked, barely there figures, are in continual movement and occupy the same space, even though they refer to different moments. Then that’s reinforced by the soundtrack – a chronological working through of the opening bars of all the adaptations that the drawings refer to. So there is a chronological movement, and in fact the drawings loop chronologically too, but they’re one on top of the other. So in a way it’s a very simple exploration of that simultaneity.

But you have that other material in Trailers which is definitely about getting somewhere and is in utter contrast to lightness - the Google material.

In Trailers I’ve referenced 20 different trailers or title sequences ¬¬of different versions of The Condor Trilogy. And from those sequences, I’ve cut the moments of flight or moments of lightness. Then intercut those with Google Street View panoramas.

Trailers was the first of the moving image pieces I made and as its name suggests, it refers both to the film and TV trailers and it also function as a trailer for the large scale work to follow.

The Google Street Views – well, I don’t want to give too much away too easily...

I think it’s fair to say there is a banality about those images?

Yes. I think there is a groundedness. There’s an interweaving of locations, a kind of translocal dimension, if you like. Also a kind of layering of fantasy, visual and textual registers.

And it’s melancholic.

Exhausting is the word...!