Lee Kai Chung
Primary page content
Lee Kai Chung's MPhil/PhD Art project
An Infrastructure of Affect: On Coloniality and Displacement in Manchuria
This project explores the coloniality of Manchuria by addressing the affect of displacement on transgenerational human experience.
Once a colony of European and Asian powers, Manchuria is located at the junction of multiple nations and states. Since the late 19th century, the idea and partial realisation of a Greater Asia Railroad animated and subjected the region to accelerated interchange and resource extraction.
Lee Kai Chung. Tree of Malevolence (2024). Sextuple-channel video installation (Super 8 film transferred to digital).
Infrastructure and coloniality in Manchuria have been appropriated as a political apparatus to unify Asia and govern China, causing displacement and trauma. Facing censorship and historical revisionism in the region, this project combines film, publishing and archival practices to readdress the complexities of identity-making in Asia.
From my post/colonial lived experience, I will engage with descendants of colonists and colonised, transnational refugees and migrants to facilitate a counter-archive that seeks to understand and challenge a colonial infrastructure of power.
Supervisors
Researcher biography
Lee Kai Chung performs artistic research on the entanglement of geopolitics, coloniality and its affective fallout. From his early explorations of postcolonial archival systems for historiography, Lee has developed an archival methodology that extends to interdisciplinary research-based creative practices, including critical fabulation, publishing, archives-making and public engagement.
Lee was awarded the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts Southeast England (CHASE) doctoral studentships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the 18th Busan International Video Art Festival <Selection 2024> prize in 2024; Honourable Mention in Sharjah Biennial 15 and Taoyuan International Art Award respectively in 2023; The Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University in 2022, he received Altius Fellowship from Asian Cultural Council in 2020; the annual Award for Young Artist (Visual Arts) from Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2018, and WMA Commission (Transition) in 2017.