Ellen Pau: She Moves

Ellen Pau: She Moves is the first US survey exhibition of the work of Ellen Pau, one of Hong Kong’s most influential and pioneering artists. The exhibition showcases Pau’s multifaceted artistic practice, featuring fourteen video works and installations from the late 1980s to the present. Rather than following a linear narrative, these works trace the shifts and turns of an artistic language developed in close dialogue with Hong Kong’s transformations—where personal trajectories and collective histories continually mirror and reflect one another.

Emerging in the 1980s and ’90s, Pau belongs to a generation of artists in Hong Kong whose practices developed amid rapid economic growth and vibrant commercial film and media industries. This period also saw the rise of community-based initiatives in the arts, with artists building their own infrastructures, exemplified by Pau’s co-founding of Videotage, an artist-run collective dedicated to new media art, in 1986. Pau taught herself video art through voracious reading and enrollment in workshops and screening programs organized by Phoenix Cine Club and experimental theater company Zuni Icosahedron, which familiarized her with a wide range of experimental approaches and cultivated her distinctive sensibility as an artist. Aside from her artistic practice, Pau worked as a radiographer at Queen Mary Hospital for nearly forty years. This professional background in medical and scientific imaging has been pivotal to the development of her visual language.

Across the years, the cultural milieu of Hong Kong has been a recurring touchstone for Pau, with the city’s colonial history and present struggles informing what can be understood as the artist’s highly personal modes of expression. Pau addresses the contemporary political context of Hong Kong without falling into nostalgia or offering direct commentary; rather, she alludes to shared experiences through emotion, harnessing the capacity of sound and image to preserve collective memory. Remnants of political ruptures are also visible in Pau’s efforts to connect gender issues with the city’s civil politics, transforming the female body into a battlefield for subjective awareness while raising prescient questions about the truthfulness of machine-produced images. The electronic medium, which the artist rigorously engages, is a source from which Pau communicates a poetic and implicit political commentary.

Ellen Pau: She Moves is curated by Freya Chou, guest curator.