Ellen Pau’s Elegy to a Vanishing Hong Kong
In the video art pioneer's first US exhibition, water’s changing states become a metaphor for the city.
Drops of water trickle down a plain white wall under a heavenly light in Ellen Pau’s 1988 video installation “She Moves 她去.” Flanked by soft white veils and a nostalgic, wooden armchair, the work introduces water as a central motif in Pau’s long-standing interest in Hong Kong as a city in constant transition, moving through cycles of lost and found.
Ellen Pau: She Moves at SculptureCenter, curated by Freya Chou, is the first United States survey exhibition of the woman widely regarded as Hong Kong’s video art pioneer. Across 15 videos and installations spanning the late 1980s to the present, water reappears in various forms: a crying wall, swimmers diving into Victoria Harbour, the scent of tear gas. Its changing states, from melting ice to evaporating mist, become a metaphor for Hong Kong herself — “always on the verge of disappearing,” as late cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas puts it — leaving little time for reflection before new changes arrive.
The city’s rapid transformation is reflected in the afterlife of “She Moves.” Over the years, the work has been transferred across formats — NTSC to PAL, VHS to DVD — remastered, and, most recently, restored with AI. With each iteration, something is lost, and something new is layered in. That state of flux is mirrored by the installation, an intimate space that invites viewers to take a seat, temporarily occupying the position of an absent subject. Who is the “she” in the title? Could it be Pau herself, who once rested in that very chair; the woman in a floral dress, who appears briefly on screen; the visitors who enter and exit the space; or even Hong Kong herself?
