Drowned V By Choi Yan-Chi Drowned V Symbolism

Drowned V is the fifth installment in Choi Yan-chi’s Drowned cycle, a long term project beginning in 1989 with her fist installation in the Hong Kong Arts Centre. While stationed in Toronto’s non-profit Mercer Union gallery, Drowned V was a personal response to the issues of identity and home that many Hong Kong citizens struggle with. The installation opened into a softly lit domestic space populated with carefully spaced Victorian style wooden furniture, dark picture frames adorned the wall and the repetitive noise of a water pump could be heard in the background (Choi). Set on the tables were fish tanks, each holding a stack of books suspended in tanks of oil. The Victorian furniture and soft lighting would first inspire the feeling of warmth

Drowned V draws on Choi’s past works and social activisms in Hong Kong’s art world, however, it takes these themes and turns them inward. Drowned V addresses the struggles Choi had with the restrictive art world of late 20th century Hong Kong through the theme of preservation. Old unwanted books (scavenged from libraries and thrift stores) sit still and preserved in oil with only their titles displayed to the viewer. They are preserved and protected, yet inaccessible and unwanted. Similarly the classical Chinese ink paintings were prioritized and protected by Hong Kong’s governments and yet they symbolized the old way that many of the modern artists of the time felt no connection with. Conflicting feelings between the classic “Chinese” identity and the modern more locally based identity in art drive this piece as Ward summarizes in her essay on Drowned V:
The two styles simply collide, and neither is thought through the practices of local, contemporary culture; the future is slapped onto the past and neither is thought through the other. The demand to sacrifice a thoughtful future for the continuation of the past has made Choi’s work difficult. But she is also aware of the problems of sacrificing past culture for the sake of a better future–the history of twentieth-century China is filled with such evidence. Suspended between two states, between two relationships with the past, Choi is at home in neither. (para