Unreliable Narrators/Unreliable Informants: Ethnographic Research in Artistic Practice

Speaker: Royce NG, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

Venue: NAH114

In Hong Kong-based artist Royce Ng’s seminar, he will speak about the problems encountered in working with informants in artistic research and its parallels with difficulties in the practice of ethnographic research. Specifically, Ng will speak about the project ‘A Season in Shell’ which he worked on with anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong and the strategies they used to develop the trust of informants in the field, and how these strategies were undermined when the truthfulness of the informants interviews were retrospectively called into question. In essence, Ng and Bisenieks approach was to fight ‘fiction with fiction’ and create ficto-critical texts and exhibitions which interrogated the very idea of ‘truth’ in the artwork and perhaps also in anthropology itself. Ng will also speak about how he translates research from primary and secondary historical resources into artworks which deliberately play with fact and fiction, as well as the use of artistic devices like ‘unreliable narrators’ and the ‘suspension of disbelief’ which are used to create narratives that are used to communicate broader ideas to audiences and might offer some alternative resources to anthropologists in their work.

Royce Ng is an artist currently based in Hong Kong. From 2013-2016 he was artist-in-residence at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich with the anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks. In 2015, their work based on their research in Chungking Mansions was selected to represent Australia at PERFORMA in New York City. The second chapter of his ‘Opium Museum’ trilogy ‘Queen Zomia’ premiered in Europe at Kampnagel Internationale Zentrum für schönere Künste in Hamburg in 2018.