Add Oil Machine 打氣機

Slought is pleased to announce "Add Oil Machine 打氣機," an online exhibition about the Hong Kong Umbrella movement (2014) and the revolutionary potential of language and collective enunciation. Organized by Slought in collaboration with the Add Oil Team, this virtual exhibition seeks to spread awareness about the power of individual and collective assemblage and the formation of community and solidarity through art. In commemoration of the final days of protests one year earlier, the project will launch on December 10, 2015 both online and at Centre A in Vancouver, Canada, where it will take the form of an outdoor projection and installation. It thus raises questions about archivization and historicization, and how institutions record and display protest movements and cultural resistance.

The title of the exhibition is derived from "Stand By You: Add Oil Machine 並肩上: 打氣機" a spontaneous four-month project by artists Sampson Wong (黃宇軒), Jason Lam (林志輝) and friends that strategically projected political writing on key government buildings in Hong Kong. Together with over 100,000 other protestors, they sought to protest recent electoral reforms by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China and campaign for universal suffrage. Their projection system operated at the intersection of public culture, activism, and urbanism, and re-visualized the symbolic authority of civic sites. Mimicking the dominant tendency to wrap buildings in advertising, they projected more than 40,000 short messages of local support and international solidarity, catalyzing a vast protest site under intense global attention.

In response to the protester's demands, the Hong Kong government and the Chinese Communist Party strengthened its control of media and educational institutions and escalated its harassment of students, scholars and protesters, quietly subduing oppositional voices and language through administrative and bureaucratic protocols. "Stand By You: Add Oil Machine 並肩上: 打氣機" can be understood as a linguistic form of resistance to this power and process. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), philosophers Gille Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce the term "minor literature" to describe the relationship between language and power, and the possibility of subversive forms of enunciation that contest domination. Recognizing the way in which the political domains co-opts both individual and societal consciousness, they recognize the potential of language and literature to express and imagine other possibilities. Minor literature builds upon the relationship between the individual and their political immediacy, and encourages new forms of solidarity and collective enunciation.

To what degree can the concept of minor literature be translated across languages, cultures, and places? "Stand By You: Add Oil Machine 並肩上: 打氣機" provides us with an opportunity to explore its applicability to the language of protest, and in particular protest in minor Chinese languages. A majority of the messages of solidarity were written in t廣東話 Cantonese, the primary language in Hong Kong yet one that is secondary to 普通話 Mandarin, the standardized Chinese dialect spoken in Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore. Cantonese people are often compelled to explain themselves in Mandarin to be understood in Mainland China and other parts of Asia, such that using Cantonese in everyday life is an affirmation of one's minoritarian cultural identity and sense of community. This project thus invites us to interrogate the politics of and relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin. Here political messages in Cantonese, a minor language, are being projected onto governmental sites of power whose association with Mandarin and Mainland China is precisely what is being contested.