Echo Yinsin Ho

By Janina Bach

Twelve years after leaving the city, and almost 25 years since moving out of her childhood home in the city's centre, Echo YinSin Ho has returned to Peking. Now she feels like a tourist who is only slowly rediscovering her ties to a modernised city which she is no longer familiar with. Returning to the home of her birth, she experiences a harsh break in time. She is filled with the sense of distance, but claims it has a positive effect on her - it forces her to reacquaint herself with her city, enabling her to perceive things which have seemingly stayed the same and things which have changed.
Echo Ho's childhood home is located close to Tiananmen Square and is one of the last traditional, one-storey court houses which has been spared demolition. Its entrance is adjacent to the splendid driveway leading to the villa owned by Peking's mayor. A small, simple gate opens to the court house which has long lost its traditional structure. Echo Ho's mother has told her stories about the large courtyard which was once filled with blooming flowers. Following the Cultural Revolution, her family had to relinquish several rooms to the new settlers, and the courtyard vanished to make space for the construction of more rooms. Now a narrow path winds its way between bicycles, potted plants and piles of bricks to the room where the Echo Ho has set up her video camera. She films the movement of the other tenants in time-lapse as they walk down the path from one room to the other, toss their garbage in front of the building or prepare their meals. The artist is interested in capturing the everyday movements of the tenants living in the court house. She observes the relationship between body and motion, between body and space, which, in her mind, are inseparable.
Coming from the outside, the artist feels like "a foreign element planted into the normal living situation" of the other residents. Drawing on Foucault's theoretical model of heterotopias, she regards the home of her birth as a place in the real world where its residents now live. On the other hand, she also sees it as a place where she can artistically address her childhood memories. She conveys this discrepancy in her video installation by creating two spaces- a real and fictitious space. She plans on creating an installation using the room from which she films the activities outside. In the installation, she will film her own performance of rehearsed movements. An off-screen narrative will explain the phenomenon of the separate, yet simultaneously existing spaces.
In addition to filming, Echo Ho will walk the streets which circle the city. She will record the acoustics beneath the bridges of traffic junctions - the intense noise of traffic and the cacophony of social interaction. There are markets on some of the bridges during the day, and in the evening, there's dancing - there are even organised dance events for singles. The artist wants to convey the ring-like structure of the city in a sound composition which she plans on integrating into her video installation as "surround sound". In this way, Echo Ho will present the various levels of juxtaposition which exist between traditional life and the modernisation of this Chinese metropolis.