La longue marche de Gregory Lee

La thématique principale de l’exposition porte sur le mensonge et la contrefaçon dans notre monde globalisé dont la Chine contemporaine ne constitue certes qu’une partie, pour autant essentielle. C’est cette mondialisation que Guy Debord a théorisée à la fin du siècle dernier dans ses Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle (1988) où il revisite son ouvrage de 1967 La Société du Spectacle.

The overarching theme of the exhibition relates to the falseness and the fake of our globalized world, of which contemporary China is only, but nevertheless an essential, part. This was a globalization that Guy Debord theorized towards the end of the last century in his revisiting of the Society of the Spectacle (1967) entitled Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988).

喺呢篇短文裡面，我哋嘗試從英國殖民統治嘅權力同埋本土富有嘅華人社會階級之間嘅歷史性妥協，點樣造成肥沃嘅土壤令另一種「華人性」嘅產生，有別於中國大陸嘅華人性，或有別於1949年逃亡去台灣嘅華人性。我哋叫呢種歷史情況做「晚期殖民主義」。英國意圖形成本土同埋可以控制嘅華人身份，但係就慢慢令本地人口養成同演變成一個自身充滿活力嘅文化同社會身份。係呢種文化，呢種社會現實狀況而家正正畀本地完全變成中華人民共和國嘅傀儡政府攻擊同埋瓦解。

2020 年 7 月，英國政府宣布將推出 BNO 簽證。一個月後，利大英 (Gregory Lee) 教授由法國搬到蘇格蘭一個叫做 St Andrews 嘅地方。 佢睇新聞，知道英國要開放 BNO 簽證，就諗﹕「即係將會有幾十萬嘅香港人過嚟英國。呢班人之後會點？佢哋嘅小朋友，將來又會有幾多空間繼續討論香港？」作為學者，佢愈諗愈覺得應該要做一樣佢一直都想做，但一直都無機會做嘅事﹕開一個有關香港、澳門，同廣東話文化嘅大學課程 module。

Presentamos un notable hallazgo del poeta chino Ai Qing: “Sobre un promontorio de Chile”, dedicado a Pablo Neruda. "Ai Qing: Un poema para Neruda". Traducción y nota de Gregory Lee.

The recent and intense attacks on what has been labelled Islamo-leftism, Islamo-gauchisme in the original, is the French iteration of a more global attack on “woke leftism”, or specifically critical race theory, gender studies and postcolonialism, summarized by France’s President Macron as the threat of “certain social science theories from the United States”.

Trump’s #chinesevirus tweet ethnicized and weaponized, COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus”. This link has lodged in the dominant white collective imagining of “the Chinese”, and now must be counted with the handful of other myths and scraps of “common sense”that go to make up that imaginary.

How can Ellul, Castoriadis and Rensi, together with Zhuangzi, whose philosophies proceed unwittingly in parallel like four ships in the night, help us to understand and imagine how we might retreat from, or even transcend, the cataclysmic moment that humanity is currently experiencing, a moment of which the coronavirus may be seen as a tragic epiphenomenon.

Castoriadis, wrote very little that directly dealt with Chinese politics. What is striking, however, is how with a time-lag of between ten and twenty years, Castoriadis's analysis of the Soviet Union may be mapped onto Mao's China. Even today looking at Xi Jinping's China the insights of Castoriadis ring true.

There is no way I could not like Jennifer Lee Tsai’s poetry, a poetry that rises like mist off the mingling tides of the rivers Mersey and Pearl. Her poetry is written out of lived experience, and so rings true. Its “Chineseness” seems natural, woven-in, not forced, not precious or ostentatious. But Tsai’s is above all a personal and ‘local’ poetry —in the best senses of both terms.