Background Dr Linda Chiu-han Lai is a research-based interdisciplinary artist, seeking extension of her doctoral training in Cinema Studies to relevant artistic and theoretical endeavors. She persists in artistic creation as the practice of theory. As a critical researcher on the History of Everyday Life, her works are historiographic experiments, visual and auto-ethnography, urbanity and popular culture. Her most recent research embodies media archaeology, highlighting the co-agency of human and machines, and intricate crossings of institution, daily makings, alternative practices, activist moments and personal callings. She created SCM’s first courses in generative art, sound art and visual ethnography. With no restriction to artistic mediums, she turns art-making into criticism, history-writing, gaming and voyages of discovery. Her works have appeared in key venues worldwide – International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Open City London Documentary Festival, LOOP Barcelona, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Women Make Waves (Taipei), and experimental film/video festivals in Seoul (EXiS), Taipei (EXiT), Macao (EXiM), Kuala Lumpur (KLEX) and Hong Kong (HKEX), among others.
As a montage artist, she considers images intensely rich perceptual surfaces that defy the binary division of representation and abstraction. Her works deploy the notion of archive and self-archiving, as in ‘1906-1989-2012: Guangzhou-Hongkong-Shanghai-Anji’ commissioned for the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012, which is also experimental history deploying childhood memory, everyday objects and HK’s postal history. She founded the HK-based new media art group, the Writing Machine Collective (2004- ), exploring computational thinking and contemporary art. The Floating Projects is her latest experiment on modes of sustainability in art-making.