Drowned Books
Drowned Books (2019) is part of the ‘Drowned’ (1989-97) series of readymade installations by Choi Yan Chi that explore themes of identity and home in relation to Hong Kong citizenship. The series began in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square incident on 4 June 1989, where student protests in Beijing led to the massacre at the hands of the Chinese government. The series initially ended with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Yan Chi explains how, during this period, ‘the people of Hong Kong never stopped agonizing over their future’. The events ‘rattled [many] to the bone. Through Drowned, I wanted to convey a sense of trauma’. Yan Chi is especially interested in the different ways viewers interpret the series, especially in relation to book censorship and national histories.
For this version, Drowned Books, the artist asked twelve women in Cambridge and twelve in Hong Kong to choose a book which was significant to them and to explain their choices in a short text. These texts were then brought together in a leaflet. At the heart of this artwork lies a paradox. The act of submerging the books in oil simultaneously preserves yet makes the interior text inaccessible, to be viewed only by title on its spine.
