“I am rooted but I flow”
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
From November 2024 to January 2025, Ivy Ma and Law Yuk-mui held separate solo exhibitions alongside each other in Xiamen as part of the 10th Jimei x Arles Photographic Award. Ma’s light filled rooms were largely taken up with artworks from two ongoing series, Bird of Shape and Double Moment, the former comprising hundreds of small scale paper collages, the latter side by side photographs taken by Ma and her young daughter. Law’s darkened space held Song of the Exile, Scene II, a multi-media installation with videos projected onto and through a gauzy hanging screen, sound, and found objects including stacked concrete blocks, a cellophane wrapped book and a toy world globe. At first glance, besides the tenuous tie of being women from Hong Kong, these artists and exhibitions might not seem overly connected. But their practices meet in their deep entanglement with place, personal histories and lived bodily experience. These nodes of connectedness extend to us as viewers through what the works hold and transmit, and how we become enfolded in them through poetic moments of felt recognition.
Bird of Shape and Double Moment have been made since Ma’s relocation away from Hong Kong in mid 2021. Law’s Song of the Exile is an evolving chapter within a larger body of work, From Whence the Waves Came, begun in 2018. Between its first iteration in 2022 and this one, Law has relocated to Japan.
Ma and her family have led an itinerant life for nearly four years now, mostly in eastern Europe. Even before then in Hong Kong, Ma had only intermittently had a studio space, but she relinquished it altogether once on the move. Through necessity, she has reshaped her practice, making it portable and incorporating materials readily available from local stationery shops. In a practice that has always been rooted in quiet observation and subtle intervention, often taking photographs or film stills and manually altering them through drawing and erasure, Ma has turned this intuitive opening out of pictorial and personal space on herself and her immediate environments.
The main components in the Bird of Shape collages are Ma’s black and white photographs of building exteriors in her temporary city homes. These are printed out on photocopy paper, combined with coloured paper and occasional touches of paint. Within them, and sometimes set apart in one-off pieces, shots of birds captured in flight wing through the composite urban skylines. Always the view is upward towards the sheltering sky and its symbolic winged inhabitants.
In the colour photographs paired in Double Moment, one is by Ma’s pre-teen daughter, one is by Ma of her daughter or something she is focused on. Two gazes, their adjacent focuses captured and bound together. The child shooting whatever catches her attention, in the mother’s shot all the consciousness of the fleeting moment backed by unspoken care. Ma’s images include close ups of worn off kiddie nail polish, a lens flare obscuring the subject leaving only an intensity of feeling. Any anxiety about the disruption in transmission of intergenerational knowledge, language, and culture shaped by diaspora and migration, offset by the solace of the moment. Observing her daughter in 2023, Ma noted, “I see how intuitive it can be watching her take pictures and write on paper. From a child’s perspective, nothing is more important than the present.” (Ma and Lam 2023) and so the mother continually makes a secure, habitable moment in the present.
The Bird of Shape series, traversing, among others, the cities of Warsaw, Paris, Antwerp, Cancun, Cardiff and Vilnius, currently runs to over 800 collages. Likewise, the photographs that have been printed out to date run into the hundreds. For both series, Ma employs a grid format for display. Within this structure, the works can expand or contract to accommodate different spaces. The grid brings order, a framework within which there is endless scope for variation and fresh juxtapositions. And calm.
Where the collages contain only buildings, birds and sky, the photographs are mainly taken in anonymous city parks, amongst trees and flowers, on grass, in urban communal green spaces. What Ma omits in both is intrusion into and use of her private domestic living space. This remains off camera. Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation not only centred on the dynamic formation of identity through relational interaction, but also the right to opacity. “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these, truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. […] This-here is the weave, and it weaves no boundaries. [...] it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms.”(Glissant 1997, 190) Ma’s this-here are the moments captured with her daughter, utterly ordinary yet transcendent, a snapshot instantly becoming the past with all the embedded poignancy of everything that has led up to shaping the moment.
In a recent fleeting online story, Ma posted a photo of a collage in progress with the caption, “the most free moment is when the cheap materials speak to you, and you make them look precious.” Here precious is unconnected to any monetary value, but rather the ability to find forms to cherish, that can carry content, to be utterly in the moment. In this moment, freedom is the ability to simply be herself, to be liberated wherever her state of temporariness is presently grounded.
Glissant also made the case for poetry and intuition as a vital means to make sense of the world, rather than being drawn into frameworks of oppositional binaries. He advocated for the poetic as a means of knowing. Ma works in this poetic space, her ideas and associations obliquely contained and refined in even, or especially, the minutiae of a captured glance. Here there is wordless affect.
Law is also involved in three-dimensional collage, but her assemblage methods and forms are strikingly diverse. In its first iteration in 2022, Song of the Exile was shown in a makeshift exhibition space in an industrial building in Hong Kong. Across multiple videos and objects, Law created a site where unexamined aspects of the history and geopolitics of Hong Kong and attendant dispersed memories intersect. Amongst the videos there is a lone percussion instrument in action, an erhu performance, song lyrics, a monologue and archival newsreel footage. They are variously projected: Law’s videos on large translucent hanging screens that billow and distort; solid boxy analogue TV sets at floor level contain the silent found footage; text rolls past on an autocue. Objects include seven toy globes in a row slowly rotating on the floor, arcing tubes of light curl nearby and deflated beach ball globes drape across hard concrete. Two books gather archival material tracking memories of Chinese Indonesians in the 1960s journeying between Port of Tanjung Priok in Jakarta to Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong. Embedded across the exhibition are fragments of people’s stories along sea-borne migratory routes that pass through Hong Kong: imagined, remembered, archived, sung, written on a postcard at sea, dissipated in a percussive clap.
There is deeply researched complexity enfolded into each segment even before it becomes a kaleidoscopic event. The percussion video shows only a close up of a hand playing a simple wooden instrument. Its clapping sound is the isolated tempo from The Wayfarer’s Lament, a dishui nanyin song, a traditional singing form from Guangdong performed by blind singers. The erhu performance is of Song of Nostalgia, a score written for and broadcast by China National Radio aimed at overseas Chinese in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. The monologue is performed by an Indonesian of Chinese descent. Archives have been forensically trawled to find traces of people journeying on the Royal Interocean Line, the originally Dutch shipping company that plied its colonial sea routes between Indonesian and Hong Kong from the 1940s to 70s.
The whole is also a performance space where Law and collaborators improvise amongst this archipelago of relation, of objects, sights and sounds, lights and movement. Law has called this multi-nodal immersive set up improvised cinema, and the live performances within it live cinema. These are important conjunctions, moving us from commercial, narrative forms of cinematic experience to experimental contemporary configurations of sensory world building.
Song of the Exile: Scene II is not a straightforward re-installation of the same material with adaptations for a new site. Previous videos have been incorporated into new versions that layer picture in picture. Found objects have been rethought and reworked, the seven spinning globes replaced by one split along its equatorial join, its blue coloured tidal innards visible. AI has been employed to generate soundscapes derived from the documentation of the first show. Law is open to utilising a multitude of technologies, and AI here is harnessed to subtly layer content she has created, not as a signifier of a glossy techbro style future. In its new location, Scene II evolves and adapts, shapeshifting along with its altered geographic vantage point, from Hong Kong to China. Fittingly as if churned by ocean tides and time, Law brought in new configurations of possibility.
Law’s installations have been described as “exhibition-sized mood envelopes—airtight enough to hold the emotional frequencies, views, and stories she captures during her sallies around the city” (Herriman Kat 2021) Airtight but still porous enough for visitors to engage with the non-linear flow and find their own affective resonances and moments of identification.
Ackbar Abbas in his seminal work Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance speaks of the inability of Hong Kong to see itself in a space of continual narrative erasure, “If hallucination means seeing ghosts and apparitions, that is, something that is not there, reverse hallucination means not seeing what is there.” (Abbas 1997, 6) In a Hong Kong buffeted between Anglo and Sino-centric viewpoints, the stories and experiences that don’t conform to sweeping national narratives can be eclipsed. In a thin history that must serve a nationalist story, reverse hallucination is all too common. Law recognizes that this space of Hong Kong is haunted by absence, absence of the rich stories that challenge such flattening of experiences. From small moments she uncovers and assembles hitherto unknown realms of interconnectedness, aligning with how Manthi Diawara characterises Glissant’s vision of assemblers in that she “recognizes and enables a relation between different people and places, animate and inanimate objects, visible and invisible forces, the air, the water, the fire, the vegetation, animals and humans.” (Diawara 2014)
Abbas also oriented Hong Kong as a nomadic site, a place of dis-location. In nomadic theory, perhaps counterintuitively, the nomad stays in place, continually adapting as the place undergoes change. These two artists didn’t need to leave Hong Kong to become nomadic, they had already been so for decades, moving through time and space, the urban landscape, geopolitics and culture around them shifting. And they having to reorient themselves to stay upright in place. Rather than being defined by stable identities or fixed points the nomad represents movement, multiplicity, and becoming. (Deleuze and Guattari 2013; Braidotti 2014). Rosi Braidotti has spent decades refining nomadic theory, and her definitions are an accurate telling of Ma and Law in person and creative practice, “The Nomad in Deleuze's thought is a symbol of freedom, fluidity, and non-conformity to rigid structures or territories. She outlines a modern subjectivity as one in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive.” (Braidotti 2011)
In explaining the lived reality versus policies and popular mindset of the European Union (EU), where Ma is now living in a constituent EU country, political journalist Eve Aldea argues that, “Everyone’s relationship to place is contingent, and able to shift, admit overlaps and even contradictions, engendered both by the movement of the subject itself and the movement of others around it.” (Aldea 2014) And she relates this to Braidotti’s understanding of how political reality has moved people towards a nomadic way of inhabiting the place in which they live.
In parallel, in their practice Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti recognise the increasing state of permanent temporariness as a feature of modern life and the role of the border as “a regulating device that mediates between birth and nationhood, it constructs and deconstructs itself depending on the relationship that each individual has with the state.” (Hilal and Petti 2018, 2) Ma’s artwork may not speak explicitly to this but navigating borders has become a feature of her life. In a time of increasingly persecutory and exclusionary politics, negotiating the borders between Hong Kong, the US and Europe is folded into Bird of Shape.
Ma has experienced a short period of bureaucratic separation from her family. State structured and legislated ethnonationalism came to bear, her ethnicity and the power of passport all part of the equation. In that moment, she became a particular kind of racialised other, one that author Chimamanda Adichie would recognize. Adichie describes how as a Nigerian, she only became classified as Black when she moved to America, (Adichie 2023). In America and Europe, Ma as an ethnically Chinese woman is both invisible and highly visible, as a non-local she has restricted rights. As a mother she has to navigate whatever the affordances are for herself and her family. Being elsewhere is to be attuned to “the weight of history and stereotypes, to know that race was always a possible reason, or cause, or explanation for the big and small interactions that make up our fragile lives.” (Adichie 2023) This period of separation was when Ma began pointing her camera upwards and shooting the birds. Of course there are much more brutal stories of separation that don’t end in reunification. They are nearby, just out of the frame.
As Ma (re)locates her centre over and over, responding to it and revealing difference and proximity, “Every location offers opportunities to think through the connections among artworks, places, politics, and resistance. So, to create from one's locality is to tell others about the world, its weaknesses and strengths, its sensibilities, its beauty and ugliness.” (Diawara 2014)
It is significant that Law, whose relocation is more recent, signs off the introduction to her newly published book with a precise date, time and location in her new home in Japan:
“The Sea Water, So Blue It’s Black is a journey of retrospection that began with a misplaced ‘imagined geography’. It not only summoned my bodily memories of fieldwork, but also spatial, emotional, and mnemonic entanglements and imaginations that have knotted into a lifeline for me to move forward. 23 August, 2024, 10 a.m, I am in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. The air here is not humid, but my body remembers the viscosity of seawater.” (Law 2024, 6-7)
Japan is already sensorily making its mark, and Law acknowledges it in relation to her bodily responses to erstwhile familiar sites. These relational contours will no doubt evolve as she deepens her relationship to her new home. These few lines encapsulate much of her approach, data collection, facts, dates, in combination with the vitality and import of lived experience and emotional response. In this and her aesthetic outcomes, Law too inhabits a Glissantian poetic agency.
The concept of imagined geographies was introduced by Edward Said in Orientalism. (Said 1978) He argued that space is not an objective phenomenon but is converted into meaning in a process with imaginative and figurative values related to naming and emotions. Thus the West’s exoticising of the East constructed an imagined superiority that ultimately deems stereotyped othered peoples as less than human. Law takes her imagined geography and uses it to deflect and dismantle Western centric engendered tropes, while Ma, whether antagonistically or not, will experience those tropes in a parallel space.
Law utilises a greenscreen in her videos but retains it unadorned as the backdrop. By letting us see the mechanics of production and not technically imposing a new background image, it allows for the possibility of multiple backgrounds/sites. The sky backdrop with its generic birds, and the unnamed parks in Ma’s collages serve a similar purpose. Actions and responses are both specific and tethered to times and places, but simultaneously also liberated to travel across time and space. “Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated and transformed through artistic and literary practice.” (hooks 2013, 23) bell hooks shows the strength of speaking and making from the margins, not attempting to move periphery to centre but to stay resolutely different and forge new systems of understanding from within difference.
Law’s practice forges newness through uncovering and entangling critical nodes, rhizomatically braiding events and the ephemera of absences, stories and bodily sensations. Interdisciplinary scholar Lisa Lowe, who challenged ways of understanding global power asymmetries in the Intimacies of Four Continents, set out a framework for reorienting official histories and what a relational, interconnected, interdisciplinary discourse could look like. (Lowe 2015) She has since written specifically about art practices such as Law’s that are particularly well placed to materially contribute to a thicker history of the present, which Lowe describes as “committed to the excavation of hidden, obscured materials that have been buried or suppressed, the excavation of which defamilairises accepted historical narratives and unsettles the givenness of the political present. […] a history of the present instead creates other possible outcomes or futures.” (Lowe 2023, 27)
Although their artistic practices take very different material and aesthetic forms, both Law and Ma’s artworks can be read as psychogeographic mappings of particular spatial terrains, funnelled through their singular autoethnographic lenses. As their situatedness changes and they fold their current locations in Lithuania and Japan into their practices, new connectivities will emerge, with new resonances for us as viewers. Geological time may make us all insignificant, but in the meantime, in the this-here and now, we can embrace our significances, our interconnectedness, our cares. The same sky canopies above us, the birds soar overhead, the seas both distance and link us. The invisible threads of connection are always here waiting to be made visible, across oceans, on the wing, even if we are standing still, the world still turning under our feet.
By Kay Mei Ling Beadman, artist, researcher and co-founder of Hong Kong artist-run initiative Hidden Space.
References:
Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culure and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong University Press.
Adichie, Chimamanda. 2023. "How I Became Black in America." The Atlantic, May 2023.
Aldea, Eve. 2014. “Nomads and Migrants: Deleuze, Braidotti and European Eunion in 2014.” OpenDemocracy. 2014.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2014. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11 (2–3): 163–84.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2013. A Thousand Plateaus. London, UK: Bloomsbury.
Diawara, Manthia. 2014. “All the Difference in the World: The Art of Kader Attia.” Art Forum. 2014.
Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy Wing (trans.). 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, US: The University of Michigan Press.
Herriman Kat. 2021. “Foundwork Dialogues: Law Yuk Mui.” Foundwork. 2021.
Hilal, Sandi, and Alessandro Petti. 2018. Permanent Temporariness. Art and Theory Publishing.
hooks, bell. 2009. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” In The Applied Theatre Reader, edited by Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston, 1st ed., 80–85. Routledge.
Law, Yuk-mui. 2024. 海水藍到變黑 The Seawater, So Blue It’s Black. Hong Kong: 藝鵠有限公司 Art and Culture Outreach Limited.
Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Lowe, Lisa. 2023. “The Materiality of Memory.” In Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison, edited by Nikita Yingxian Cai, Robert Leckie, and Zara Stanhope, 21–29. Govett_brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, Guangdong Times Museum, Spike Island and Mousse Publishing.
Ma, Ivy, and Stephen Lam. 2023. “Flower . Mother | A Conversation Exhibition by Ivy Ma and Stephen Lam.” Lumenvisum. 2023.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Woolf, Virginia. 1931. The Waves. Hogarth Press
無言的聯結
「我紮根其中，但我流動。」
——弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫，《海浪》
從2024年11月至2025年1月，馬琼珠與羅玉梅在廈門舉辦了各自的個展，二展並置，作為第十屆集美·阿爾勒攝影節發現獎的一部分。馬琼珠的展廳光線明亮，主要呈現了她兩個持續創作系列的作品：《鳥之形狀》和《影她，她影》。《鳥之形狀》由數百件小型紙上拼貼組成；《影她，她影》則展出了她與年幼女兒分別拍攝的並置攝影作品。羅玉梅的展間則較為幽暗，展出的是多媒體裝置《客途秋恨：第二現場》，作品以紗簾為幕，投影影像於其上與其後，輔以聲音，以及一些現成物件，包括疊放的水泥磚、一冊用玻璃紙包裹的書和一個玩具地球儀。乍看之下，除了同為來自香港的女性藝術家，這兩位藝術家及其展覽似乎關聯不深。然而，她們的創作在對「地方」、個人歷史與身體經驗的深入糾纏中相遇。這些聯結的節點也透過作品所承載與傳遞的內容延伸至我們觀者，並在那些富有詩意的、被感知的識別瞬間中，使我們也被包裹其中。
《鳥之形狀》和《影她，她影》皆創作於馬琼珠於2021年中離開香港之後。羅玉梅的《客途秋恨》則是其更大規模創作項目《那傳來浪潮的方向》中的一個不斷演進的章節，該項目始於2018年。自2022年首次展出該作品以來，羅玉梅已遷居至日本。
馬琼珠與家人近四年來過着漂泊的生活，大多時間在東歐各地。早在仍居香港時，她便只間歇性地使用工作室空間，搬離香港之後則徹底放棄了工作室。出於實際需求，她重塑了自己的創作方式，使其更具可攜性，並轉而使用當地文具店中容易取得的材料。她的創作一直以來皆紮根於靜觀與微妙介入之間，常通過對照片或電影畫面的手工描繪與擦除去介入圖像。如今，這套直覺性的圖像與私密空間的打開方式轉向了，她開始以自己及其所處的日常環境為新的工作對象。
《鳥之形狀》拼貼作品的主要元素，是馬琼珠在其臨時居住城市中拍攝的黑白建築外景照。這些影像被打印在紙上，與彩色紙張以及偶爾點綴的顏料組合在一起。在拼貼作品中——有時也作為獨立圖像呈現——穿梭飛翔的鳥被捕捉在城市天際線之間。畫面視角始終是向上仰望，指向庇護般的天空與那象徵性的有翼棲居者。
在《影她，她影》中並置的彩色照片中，一張由馬琼珠年幼的女兒拍攝，另一張則是馬拍攝的女兒或她所注視之物。兩個視角、兩個彼此鄰近的關注點被捕捉下來，並聯結在一起。孩子拍下她所被吸引的任何事物；而母親的鏡頭中，則藴含了對轉瞬即逝片刻的全然意識，背後是無言的關愛。馬的照片中包括剝落的兒童指甲油的特寫，鏡頭光暈遮蔽主體，僅留下濃烈的情緒感。離散與遷徙所帶來的代際知識、語言與文化傳承的中斷，那種焦慮被當下片刻的慰藉所抵消。2023年，馬觀察女兒時寫道：「看她拍照、在紙上寫字，那種直覺性讓我深受觸動。從孩子的角度來看，沒有什麼比當下更重要。」（馬琼珠與林兆輝的對談，2023）因此，作為母親的她不斷在此刻建構出一個安穩、可居的片刻空間。
《鳥之形狀》系列迄今已包括超過800件拼貼作品，拍攝地遍及華沙、巴黎、安特衞普、坎昆、加的夫與維爾紐斯等城市。已打印出的攝影作品也達數百張。兩個系列在展出時皆採用網格排列的方式；藉由這一結構，作品可以因應不同空間自由伸縮。網格帶來秩序，為變奏與新的並置提供一個框架，也帶來一種平靜。
拼貼作品中僅包含建築、鳥與天空；而攝影作品主要拍攝於城市中無名的公園，在樹木與花叢之間、草地之上，在城市中的公共綠地之中。馬琼珠在兩個系列中都刻意避開了私人居所空間的進入與使用——這始終不在畫面之中。愛德華·格里桑（Édouard Glissant）在其《關係詩學》中不僅提出透過關聯互動不斷生成的身份觀，也主張“模糊權”（opacity）。他説：「模糊可以共存、可以交匯，編織出織物。若要真正理解這些，就必須專注於其織紋，而非其組成成分的本質。……這‘此在’就是那編織物，它的編織沒有邊界……它將成為關係的真正基礎，在自由之中。」（Glissant 1997, 190）而馬的「此在」便是與女兒共同捕捉的瞬間——極為日常卻又超然，一張快照瞬即成為過去，承載着構成那一刻的一切前因的隱約感傷。
在一則轉瞬即逝的網絡限時動態中，馬發佈了一張尚在製作中的拼貼作品照片，並配文：「最自由的時刻，是廉價的材料與你説話，而你讓它們看起來如此珍貴。」在這裏，「珍貴」與金錢價值無關，而是指找到可被珍視的形式，能夠承載內容，能夠完全沉浸於當下的能力。在這一刻，自由意味着能單純地成為自己——在她此刻被暫時安置的地方，自在地活着。
格里桑還強調詩歌與直覺作為理解世界的重要方式，而非陷入對立二元框架之中。他主張通過詩意作為一種認知的路徑。馬琼珠的創作正是在這個詩意空間內進行的，她的思想和聯想隱晦地凝練在一瞥即逝的細節中，藴含無言的情感。
羅玉梅也涉足三維空間的拼貼，但她的組合方式和形態極為多樣化。2022年，《客途秋恨》首次展出時，呈現在香港一棟工業樓內的臨時展覽空間。通過多段錄像和物件，羅玉梅構建了一個場域，讓香港歷史與地緣政治中未被審視的層面與隨之而來的分散記憶交織在一起。展覽中的視頻包括：獨奏的打擊樂器、二胡演奏、歌曲歌詞、獨白以及檔案新聞片段。影像以不同形式投射：羅玉梅的視頻在大幅飄動、變形的半透明懸掛幕布上播放；實心盒狀的模擬電視機陳列於地面，播放無聲的歷史影像；提詞器上滾動文字。展覽中的物件有七個玩具地球儀排成一排緩慢旋轉，附近彎曲的光管如弧形光弧，癟塌的充氣沙灘球散落於堅硬的混凝土地面。兩本書彙集了檔案資料，記錄了20世紀60年代華印尼人在雅加達丹戎不碌港至香港尖沙咀之間的遷徙記憶。展覽貫穿其中的是海上遷徙路線中人們的故事碎片：被想象、被記憶、被檔案保存、被歌唱、寫在海上的明信片上，或在一聲擊掌中消散。
在呈現為萬花筒般的視覺事件之前，每個章節中都已藴含着深度的研究複雜性。打擊樂視頻僅展現了一個手演奏簡單木製樂器的特寫，其拍擊聲正是《客途秋恨》中的節奏片段——這是一首地水南音歌曲，屬於廣東傳統的唱法，一般由盲人歌手演唱。二胡演奏的是《懷鄉曲》，這是一首為中國中央人民廣播電台創作並播出的曲目，面向台灣及東南亞的海外華人。獨白由一位印尼華裔演員演繹。檔案資料經過細緻搜尋，追溯那些乘坐皇家遠洋航線（原為荷蘭公司，1940年代至70年代間運營印尼至香港殖民海路）的旅人蹤跡。
整體展覽也成為一個表演場域，羅玉梅及其合作者在這一由物件、景象、聲音、光影與動態組成的關係羣島中即興演出。她稱這一多節點沉浸式佈置為「電影現場」，現場表演則為「活的電影」。這一概念極具意義，它將觀眾從商業化敍事的電影體驗中解放出來，帶入實驗性的當代感官世界構建。
《客途秋恨：第二現場》並非對先前素材的簡單復裝，而是為新場地量身改編。之前的視頻被重新編排，採用畫中畫的層疊方式。現成物被重新思考和改造，七個旋轉地球儀被替換為沿赤道切割開、內裏藍色潮汐紋理可見的單一地球儀。AI技術被用於生成基於首展紀錄的聲景。羅玉梅樂於使用多種技術手段，而此處的AI僅作為微妙疊加她創作內容的工具，而非展示炫目科技風格的未來象徵。作品隨着從香港遷至中國內地的新地理視角而不斷演化、適應，恰如海潮與時光的攪動，羅玉梅帶來了新的可能性配置。
羅玉梅的裝置作品被描述為「展覽規模的情緒包裹——足夠密閉以承載她在城市遊歷中捕捉到的情感頻率、視角和故事」（Herriman Kat 2021）。這種密閉性又保持一定的滲透性，使觀眾能夠介入非線性的流動，找到自己的情感共鳴和認同時刻。
阿克巴·阿巴斯（Ackbar Abbas）在其開創性著作《香港：文化與消失的政治》中指出，香港無法在持續的敍事抹消空間中看到自身，「如果幻覺意味着看到鬼魂和幻影，即不存在之物，那麼逆幻覺則是看不到真實存在之物。」（Abbas 1997, 6）在夾縫於英美視角與中國中心主義之間的香港，那些不符合宏大民族敍事的故事與經驗往往被遮蔽。在一段必須服務於民族主義敍事的單薄歷史中，逆幻覺現象極為常見。羅玉梅意識到，這樣的香港空間被缺席所困擾，即缺席那些挑戰單一扁平化經驗的豐富故事。她從細微的瞬間中挖掘、組裝出迄今未被揭示的互聯領域，契合曼西·迪亞瓦拉（Manthia Diawara）對格里桑（Glissant）組裝者的描述——她「認知並促成不同人羣與地點、生命與非生命物、可見與不可見力量、空氣、水、火、植被、動物與人的關係。」（Diawara 2014）
阿巴斯還將香港定位為一個遊牧之地——一個失位（dis-location）的場所。在遊牧理論中，或許有些反直覺的是，遊牧者實際上並非不斷遷徙，而是「留在原地」，隨着所在之地的變化不斷調整和適應。這兩位藝術家並不需要離開香港才能成為遊牧者，他們早已成為遊牧者——數十年來，她們穿梭於時間與空間之間，城市景觀、地緣政治與文化不斷變遷，而她們必須不斷重新定位自我，才能保持立足。遊牧者不被穩定身份或固定座標定義，而是代表着運動、多元性和生成的過程。（德勒茲與加塔裏 2013；佈雷多蒂 2014）
羅西·佈雷多蒂（Rosi Braidotti）數十年來致力於完善遊牧理論，她的定義準確地詮釋了馬琼珠與羅玉梅的個人身份與創作實踐：「在德勒茲的思想中，遊牧者是自由、流動與反抗僵化結構或領土的象徵。他勾勒出現代主體的流動性，這一主體從未與主導的等級體系對立，卻本質上是他者，始終處於生成之中，且不斷捲入創造性與限制性的動態權力關係之中。」（Braidotti 2011）
馬琼珠現居歐盟。在闡釋歐盟（EU）的政策與主流心態與個體的實際生活經驗之間的差異時，政治記者伊芙·阿爾迪亞（Eve Aldea）指出：「每個人與地方的關係都是有條件的，並且能夠變化，容許重疊甚至矛盾，這既由主體自身的流動，也由周圍他者的流動所促成。」（Aldea 2014）她將此觀點與佈雷多蒂對政治現實如何推動人們走向遊牧式居住方式的理解相聯繫。與此同時，桑迪·希拉爾（Sandi Hilal）與亞歷山德羅·佩蒂（Alessandro Petti）在其創作實踐中意識到，永久臨時狀態已成為現代生活的一個特徵，而邊界則是一種「調節裝置，介於出生與國籍之間，依賴個體與國家關係的不同而不斷建構與解構自身。」（Hilal and Petti 2018, 2）雖然馬的藝術作品未必直言此意，但跨越邊界已成為她生活的一部分。在日益加劇的迫害性與排斥性政治氛圍下，遊走於香港、美國與歐洲的邊界，亦深刻融入其作品《鳥之形狀》中。
馬琼珠曾經歷過一段因官僚體系導致的與家人分離的時期。國家所構建並立法的族羣民族主義在其中發揮了作用，她的族裔身份與護照的權力共同構成了這一局面。在那一刻，她成為了一種特定形式的種族化他者，正如作家奇瑪曼達·恩戈齊·阿迪契（Chimamanda Adichie）所描述的那樣。阿迪契講述了她作為尼日利亞人，直到移居美國後才被歸類為黑人身份的經歷（Adichie 2023）。在美國和歐洲，作為華裔女性的馬琼珠既是隱形的，也是極其顯眼的；作為非本地人，她的權利受到限制。作為母親，她必須在為自己和家人爭取各種可能的條件中艱難前行。身處他鄉，便要敏感於「歷史的重負與刻板印象，知道種族始終可能成為大大小小交往中的理由、原因或解釋，這些交往構成了我們脆弱的生命。」（Adichie 2023）正是在這段分離時期，馬開始將鏡頭指向天空，拍攝飛翔的鳥兒。當然，還有更為殘酷的分離故事，這些故事並未以團聚告終，它們就在畫面之外，近在咫尺。
隨着馬不斷地（重新）定位她的中心，回應這一定位並揭示差異與親近，「每一個地方都提供了思考藝術作品、地點、政治與抗爭之間關聯的機會。因此，從自身的地方性出發創作，即是在向他者講述這個世界，它的弱點與力量，它的敏感度，以及它的美與醜。」（Diawara 2014）
值得注意的是，羅玉梅的遷居相對較為近期，她在新近出版的著作序言結尾處，精確地標註了新居所在日本的具體日期、時間和地點：
「《海水藍到變黑》藉由一個錯置的地理想像去展開一趟回溯，不只召喚了許多我過往做田野調查時的身體記憶；空間、情感、記憶紐結想像，十多年，交織出一個麻花，像給自己一條救生繩，欲前行，如果可以。2024年，8月23日，早上10時，我在日本的千葉縣，這裡沒有潮濕的空氣，身體卻記得海水的黏稠。」（Law 2024，第6-7頁）
日本已經以感官的方式開始在她的身體記憶中留下印記，羅玉梅也意識到了這一點，特別是在她對以往熟悉場所身體反應的關係中。這些關係的輪廓無疑將隨着她與新居的深入互動而不斷演變。這幾句話濃縮了她創作方法的精髓——將數據收集、事實、日期，與生命體驗的活力和情感反應相結合。在此及其美學成果中，羅玉梅同樣體現了格里桑（Glissant）式的詩性能動性。
「想像地理」（imagined geographies）一詞最早由愛德華·賽義德在《東方主義》中提出（Said 1978）。他指出，空間並非客觀實存，而是在一個賦予意義的過程中被形塑出來，帶有命名與情感相關的想象與象徵價值。因此，西方對於東方的異域化建構不僅製造出一種想象中的優越性，最終更是將被定型、被他者化的人民視作「次於人類」的存在。羅玉梅藉助自身的「想像地理」來反轉並瓦解這些以西方為中心的性別化論述，而馬琼珠，無論是否帶有對抗性，在另一個平行空間中也同樣會遭遇這些論述。
羅玉梅在其影像作品中使用綠幕，但她保留其原貌，不加修飾地作為背景。通過讓觀者看見製作的機制，而非技術性地置換背景圖像，這種做法打開了多重背景/場所的可能性。馬琼珠拼貼中的天空背景、飛鳥，以及無名公園，同樣具有類似的功能。藝術家的行動與回應既具有具體的時空錨定，同時也被釋放出來，可跨越時間與空間自由流動。正如 bell hooks 所言：「空間可以是真實的，也可以是想象的。空間可以講述故事，展開歷史。空間也可以被打斷、挪用，並透過藝術與文學實踐被轉化。」（hooks 2013, 23）hooks 強調了從邊緣出發發聲與創作的力量——不是試圖將邊緣推入中心，而是在堅守差異的同時，從差異內部開闢出新的理解系統。
羅玉梅的創作在揭示與糾纏關鍵節點中生成出「新的事物」，以根莖狀方式編織事件、缺席的殘痕、故事與身體感知等片段。跨領域學者 Lisa Lowe 曾在其《四大洲的親密關係》中批判主流全球權力關係的理解模式，提出了一種重構官方歷史敍事、建立關聯性與交織性學術話語的框架（Lowe 2015）。此後她特別書寫了如羅玉梅此類藝術實踐，並認為這類創作在物質層面上為「當下的厚重歷史」作出貢獻。Lowe 所説的「當下的歷史」，正是指一種「致力於挖掘那些被隱藏、遮蔽的材料，通過將其帶出地表，使既有的歷史敍述變得陌生，並撼動既定政治現實的自然性。[……]‘當下的歷史’創造出其他可能的結果與未來。」（Lowe 2023, 27）
儘管羅與馬的藝術實踐在媒介與美學形式上極為不同，她們的作品皆可被視作對特定空間地貌的心理地理映繪（psychogeographic mappings），透過各自獨特的自我民族誌視角（autoethnographic lenses）展開。隨着她們的在地位置變動，將立陶宛與日本的現居地融入實踐之中，新的連結亦將隨之浮現，為我們這些觀者帶來新的迴響。在地質時間的尺度下，我們或許皆屬渺小，但在此時此地，我們依然可以擁抱自身的意義、彼此的聯結與我們的關愛。頭頂是同一片天空，鳥兒飛翔其間，海洋既是距離，也是聯繫。那些看不見的聯結線索始終存在，等待我們讓它們顯現——無論我們身在何方、是否靜止，世界依然在我們腳下轉動。
作者：Kay Mei Ling Beadman是一位藝術家和研究者，她也是香港獨立藝術空間Hidden Space的聯合創始人。
中文翻譯：萬豐
