Sampson Wong's 'When in doubt, take a walk' [in Hong Kong]: walking as an infrastructural practice, or a practice of infrastructure

Abstract

The talk looks at “When in doubt, take a walk,” a youtube video series created by the Hong Kong artist Sampson Wong and the photographer Eric Tsang. Each five minute video follows Wong or another protagonist through Hong Kong: parks, housing projects and the infrastructures of the street. Along with sounds of traffic, pedestrian signals and bird noises, each video has a soundtrack of ambivalent melancholy and ends with a request to like and share, creating a community of subscribers. In her writing about Lisa Robertson’s walks through Vancouver, Sandra Macpherson argues that hers is an “affective practice that expresses the city in terms of fluidity of becoming rather than the fluidity of commodity exchange.” Macpherson makes the point that “as both an aesthetic and a revolutionary practice,” walking is accompanied by a masculinist narrative that is “individualistic, heroic, epic and transgressive.” Robertson's walks and the writing that documented them “shift the emphasis from solitude, transgression and heroism to interconnectedness and the productivity of relations.” Wong’s videos function similarly. They are also a response to the uncertainty of how to proceed in a political situation that seems exhausted of hope. They are a strategy to make it through what Lauren Berlant called the “long middle of change” in which any attempt at structuring a response is a provision that allows for a continuing. For Wong and his friends, it is the capacity to move through the city freely, discovering it anew, that becomes the locus of political agency.