3-channel video projection, 20 chromira prints on dibond, 10 drawings with ash on paper
Canaries (the bank and the treasury) is a project that proposes a narrative link between multinational banking, Taoist funerary rituals, and overseas communities originating from Hong Kong. The story is centered on the former global headquarters of the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation located in the Central district of Hong Kong. HSBC was one of the main institutions founded by the British in the colony in 1865 following the First Opium War with China. The bank, present-day HSBC Holdings PLC, is ranked among the largest multinational financial services corporations in the world. The headquarters is a futuristic skyscraper designed by the British architect Norman Foster, completed in 1986 using space-age components and cladding prefabricated in Britain, Japan, and the U.S. and shipped to Hong Kong for assembly on-site as multi-story modules.
The various "assets" of the bank -- its corporate history, architectonics, identity -- and the symbolic landmark in Central are used as conceptual and sculptural templates for an idiosyncratic study about the colonial forces that established and sustain the city. Set against this corporate history is an examination of Taoist death rituals involving the burning of paper effigies at funerals. Still a popular practice in Hong Kong today, the custom revolves around an elaborate set of ideas about loans, treasuries, and bureaucrats that exist in the spirit world. The form of the paper effigies range from modest everyday objects to commissioned replicas of cars, private jets, and mansions.
The main component of the project is a 3-channel video that combines original footage shot in Hong Kong in the Foster building and other locations in the city; Canary Wharf, London; the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Lab at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada, and archival film from the U.S. Library of Congress of the first moving images ever recorded in Hong Kong, shot in 1897 by Thomas Edison. The central projection tells the story of a fictional character who has worked most of his life for the bank and focuses on the overlap between his memories of the city and the vast history associated with the bank building where he works. The "landmarks" that have been created by HSBC both in Hong Kong and abroad are so numerous that everywhere he travels he encounters connections to the bank and its history of expansion.
The left and right channels show loosely edited documentation of a paper sculpture being made by different effigy craftsmen in Hong Kong, London, Toronto, and Vancouver. The footage slowly reveals that they are constructing different segments of the HSBC tower that appears throughout the story on the central channel. The completed modules are then transported to Toronto, assembled to form a complete effigy of the tower, and then burnt. This "overseas fabrication" mimics the construction history of the building while highlighting the global migration of a cultural practice carried abroad by the Hong Kong-nese diaspora, along routes established by transnational capital. However, as the bank building burns, the image takes on an ambiguous meaning, sitting uncomfortably between conflicting cultural perspectives.