28/9/24

A deconstructed metro car structure, a composition of video screens, blinking handles, and metal benches, is set amidst an ambient soundscape of a train in motion. ‘Mass Transit Railway’ is a new installation by Sing Jantzen Tse that transforms mundane objects related to transportation, public streets, and recreational parks, employing a multi-screen and sound playback composite construction to evoke a feeling of sensory overload.

In a series of small screens overhead, Lana Tong: A Tailormade Tour (2024) shows a tourist guide who travels with us through the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, from a public estate to a hectic shopping district. Her commentary is conveyed via deliberately low-fidelity speakers to emulate the sound quality of weathered public broadcast speakers. Passengers Back and Forth (2024) is displayed over six vertical screens, which feature passengers on a subway minding their own business. Seemingly banal, it represents a microcosm of everyday Hong Kong life, reenacted with detailed choreography by the artist who enlisted actors. Overhead, four small screens loop videos that parody advertisements of luxury apartments and dance tutorials inspired by square dancing trends, a blend of humour and self-deprecation. Juxtaposing public and personal space; interior and exterior, the video installation explores the social aspects of image production and consumption in our daily lives.

Tse is more interested in presenting a psychogeography of the city, combining footage that he had been shooting since the pandemic, and snippets of childhood memories preserved on VHS. Tse’s blend of nostalgia along with the reframing of the banal cityscape through the lens of a tourist guide is inspired by the aesthetic language used in 90s TV advertisements promoting Hong Kong as the perfect ‘East meets West’ travel hotspot, and also the surge of tourists from the mainland after the SARS outbreak, a result of the Global Tourism Revival programme rolled out by the Hong Kong Tourism Board in 2003, which promoted more fluid travel between the borders. The influx of tourism brought in heightened clashes of culture, and contrasting attitudes towards what consisted of appropriate etiquettes and behaviour which were often scrutinised and exacerbated in public transportation. Just as the MTR often became the site of happenings, this exhibition proposes to do the same - the installation will become a container and enabler of activations by other artists and performers throughout the two months.

Ultimately, the metro train traverses through space and time - between geographical borders, through memories, nostalgia and the collective anxieties about a foggy future. Mass Transit Railway evades didactic commentary on the changing cityscape of the artist’s hometown, but questions the symbolic role of the tourist guide as a mediator and narrator - what does it mean for one’s hometown to be explained through the words of ‘the other’? How can a city be ‘owned’ by those who describe it?


Sing Jantzen Tse’s (b.1987) creates audio-visual works that consider the relations of people, language and city landscapes.In his videos, which are often presented together in his installations, he attempts to express the inseparable and entangled relationships between people and cities, the soul and time. Interested in multimedia practices, he works with mixed media with a focus on audio-visual moving images. In 2012, his experimental sound work Language toured various theatrical performance programmes in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei. Between 2011 to 2015, he was invited as a resident artist touring Africa, India, and the United Kingdom. In 2017, he co-founded the art group “Dabinlo Lab”, which focuses on video projects, sound and music performance, and multimedia art production focusing on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). As a musician he is active in band shows and has composed and improvised music for multimedia theatre performances. He has also led sound and video workshops for local institutions. Sing Jantzen Tse received his Master of Fine Art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has been supported by soundpocket’s Artist Support Programme 2011–12.