Hope & Dread Extra: Tiffany Sia

Hope & Dread Extra: Tiffany Sia features the artist, filmmaker, and writer Tiffany Sia who recently left Hong Kong for fear of her safety..

Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman. 

Charlotte Burns:

Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.

Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.

Today we’re bringing you more from Tiffany Sia an artist, filmmaker, and writer, whose recent work, Too Salty Too Wet, tells the story of Hong Kong now. Tiffany wrote some of it from the frontlines of the pro-democracy protests and we talked to her about what she describes as narratives of trauma and violence, not only from the recent protests but from centuries of colonial subjugation.  Here she talks about how those narratives are formed through media and technology today. 

Tiffany Sia:

I'm really interested in the liveness of the timeline, the liveness of broadcasts and streams, and the way in which I think technology, especially for organizers and activists on the ground to get information out there that gets beyond and penetrates through even the news outlets that shape overarching narratives. I think more and more you see activists doing Instagram lives or live streams and things like that to interrupt the news cycle and to insert a more-on-the-ground version. 

I think it goes back to also this notion of what a political artist is, and I kind of refuse to see the artist as this political figure. I think, at best, we are attending to the times, but art isn't going to materially change the circumstances of the way that people live. 

I think artists have the ability of shifting the focus and also describing things that are unnameable and doing the necessary work of locating the things that are unnameable. But I think to look at political art as the apex of action, I think it is a bit misguided. [Laughs] 

And the way that I position my work entirely—it's like to think that this is going to materially change people's lives, it's not. But the important thing is, and maybe this is the most political aspect also, is the archive and the importance of bringing to the archive—and what the timeline is useful for is how it is a live archiving of these missives of our times that are so critical for the culmination of historians that maybe haven't been born yet. 

Charlotte Burns:

How do you capture that? How do you sit in that surf? How do you filter it?

Tiffany Sia:

I think that part of filtering it is knowing how an artist is not a journalist. And knowing where the work of journalism is, which is to document and create a more objective view. Those are these notions that are propagated within journalism school. But seeing the artist as a distinctly subjective perspective, and also that the artist can do things that attend to more creative ways of telling the times.  

I think that there is something more profound about waiting for the narrative of the long duration and the longer resistance. Writing Too Salty Too Wet, I think I spent a year and a half writing that and I wrote that in the protests literally while I was volunteering, standing next to the front lines, just writing it on my phone and then writing it even through the National Security Law when that was dropped.

And during that time I was asked to write for outlets, but I refused because I just don't think that that is the work that I should be doing. The conclusions that should be made at this time are much more complicated than say, like a think tank analysis that can be absorbed by governments to shape policy and things like that. 

I wrote that text also for other Hong Kongers either in Hong Kong or abroad. And part of this process of repair that's going to be ongoing—and there's never going to be a full repair—is trying to make sense of our history. And we just happened to be living through one of its most intense parts right now. 

And kind of this creation of what Hong Kong identity even means when it's always been foreclosed as this durational, colonial suspension: a state of suspension for a group of people, many of whom came here to seek political refuge. If you look at the history of Hong Kong, it's the site of not just a diaspora out, but also a diaspora in from the mainland over the last decades and over the last century from China and also from Southeast Asia and South Asia for political refuge, for economic refuge. 

Too Salty Too Wet is an extremely angry text. It's also an extremely vulnerable text. It even talks about my menstrual cycle that was interrupted by constant exposure to tear gas. And then the aggression also comes in with the way in which I write about the voyeuristic, the kind of parachute, journalists who came in for short periods of time just to make their career-defining documentaries and then leaving and in watching that live, in person. 

And there's a weird kind of consumption. It's like the knowledge one is being consumed. And then also trying to gain some kind of agency in the fight as well. And that all bears on this slippery exchange through the looking glass, if you will, of being part of a news story, of being part of these stories, of being part of a colonial narrative as well, being part of a whole history of travelogs about Hong Kong with merchants and missionaries who came here in the 1800s, for instance. It’s really funny because if you look at some of these writings, now of how journalists are writing today versus someone like Arthur H. Smith who wrote this canonical Orientalist text called Chinese Characteristics, there's an eerie similarity to how the optics of viewing the orient haven't changed at all and the power dynamics of that gaze. 

Charlotte Burns:

The show is called Hope & Dread, when you look ahead, what do you feel?

Tiffany Sia:

[Laughs] I feel plenty of both, I think. The fact that people like the New Red Order are making the works that they do now and have the platforms that they do now, I think that's really hopeful and moving really critical conversations like decolonization is not a metaphor. That's part of more popular discourse. So I feel hopeful in those ways. And I think that there's just generally, more broadly, a vernacular that I think people can have these advanced conversations now. 

But I do feel a ton of dread, especially about the ongoing times in Hong Kong, the people who can leave and then the people who are not going to leave and the people who can't leave. There lies a very complicated road ahead, I think, for any diaspora to be constructing or making sense of identity in the future going forward. So there is a hope in that too. But there's a deep sadness that this time is extremely, extremely hard to make sense of right now.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Tiffany, tune in to episode three, “Controlling Culture,” episode nine, “Artists: Players or Pawns?” and episode 12, “Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?”. 

Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. 

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez. 

And our theme music is by the inimitable Philip Glass.