Two-channel video
video:
part one: http://vimeo.com/62610954, 24min28s
part two: http://vimeo.com/62988602, 7min12s
On his 28th birthday, Tang Kwok-hin found himself contemplating mortality. A vague childhood memory surfaced — the echo he once heard near an ancestor’s grave in the hills. Never having verified it, he set out alone by bicycle from his home in Kam Tin, traveling through the rapidly shifting landscapes of Hong Kong’s New Territories — where rural fields and traditional villages abruptly collide with encroaching urban development.
In Is There an Echo in the Hill?, presented as a two-channel video installation, Tang documents this solitary pilgrimage. Upon reaching the grave, he calls out the names of fourteen people he has known who have passed away. He hopes the mountain will respond — that each call might produce an echo, symbolically doubling the fourteen names into twenty-eight, matching his age on that day.
More than a personal ritual of remembrance, the work becomes a meditation on memory, ancestry, time, and longing. The physical journey mirrors an inner one: a search for connection across the boundary between life and death, presence and absence. The question of whether the hill will echo becomes a larger existential inquiry — do our voices, our histories, and our losses resonate in a rapidly changing world, or do they simply fade into silence?
