Lee Kai Chung performs artistic research on archival histories, infrastructural remains, and ideology through performance, moving image installations, publications and public programmes. In this talk, Lee will share excerpts from his most recent videos, such as Tree of Malevolence (2023-) – a project that explores the multiple roles played by intelligence operatives in British Hong Kong and Guangzhou during the Cold War. Interweaving personal testimony, interview transcripts, critical fabulation and archival records based on key historical events, it traces the story of ‘Y’, a secret agent and forestry officer tasked with organising The People’s Republic of China’s first urban greening project for the international Canton Trade Fair in the late 1950s. Amidst the chatter of traders from British Hong Kong, Macau and foreign countries, the video unveils the complexities of human nature and individual agency in a period of Maoist collectivism and wider geopolitical power struggles. Tree of Malevolence is a prelude to Lee’s overarching project The Cold Mountain (2021-) which delves into the history of China’s international relations in the Cold War period as well as the resulting environmental degradation across Eurasia.

The artist’s longstanding interest in historical erasure, colonialism, ecology and agency is reflected in his previous work, such as the highly regarded ‘Displacement’ series, which includes The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2017-19) a piece that tracks the material and ideological transformation of public statues in Hong Kong; The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea (2019-20) which centres on the necropolitics of the Nanshitou Refugee Camp in Guangzhou during the Japanese occupation; and The Infinite Train (2021 -) – a hauntological study of the ruins of the Japanese Empire’s mega-infrastructural project, the Great Eastern Railroad, in Manchuria. Lee will speak about his ‘archival methodology’ and research-based practice, addressing some of the challenges of excavating concealed histories of transgression and agency in a ‘post-truth’ age.

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This is the second event in The 2024 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series, ‘Critical Habitats’, convened by Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at The Courtauld, and Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director at Asymmetry Art Foundation.