Elephant in Castle – some comments on the animated observations of Florence Lee
Even after watching it for the eighth time, there is this one moment that always gives me the creeps. The 2019 created animation Elephant in Castle by the Hong Kong-based artist Florence LEE is only 167 seconds long, but those seconds are quite something. It begins in the dark blue of night. With a view from outside into a window. You can hear the noise in the crowded street. As we zoom into the window, a person's face becomes visible. It is not a young person we see. A lonely person. Melancholic. Somehow it is a very quiet moment and there is this feeling of unease as we watch this lonely person. Then a pan to a fading curtain. A cut. A restaurant. Three tables are occupied. On the left, an elderly man in a cap. Eating spaghetti with a Milktea. At the middle table, a boy eating a dessert and another older man reading a newspaper with his left arm propped up. On the far right we see a red-haired woman with her back to us. An everyday scene of the kind that can be found in thousands and thousands in Hong Kong and Asia. The people and objects are roughly drawn, as if fleetingly sketched. The space literally vibrates through the overlapping strokes. In the centre of the picture, a field of the picture enlarges and points into the interior of the kitchen. The drawing style changes and shows - surrounded by vibrations - a much calmer and painterly picture. Dishes clatter. Snatches of conversation can be heard. But nothing can be understood. A cook in a blue apron, white shirt and white headdress takes a plate, puts the food on it and places the plate on a pass-through. It is one long routine movement. Performed hundreds of times a day and night. No movement too much, none too little. On the pass-through are some bottles, two baskets, one with cutlery, then to the right a pot, presumably tea, and some glasses. Florence Lee is an exceptionally good observer of the heroines and heroes of everyday life and the environment in which they operate. Cut. On the pass-through is a soup plate consisting of five shades of blue with spaghetti, four red tomato quarters, some olives, greenish capers (?) and some yellow corn kernels. The latter will still play a special role. A stool and its shadow complete the still life. In the meantime, 49 seconds have passed and I'm starting to get hungry, because I'm dying to know what happens next. The waiter, a young man with a moustache in a white shirt, arrives and at the exact moment he reaches for the plate, a cleverly placed reverse shot. Now you see the situation from the kitchen. In the foreground the cook. In the background the waiter, taking the plate and leaving to the left. Another cut. The tiled wall of the restaurant shows four window-like, identical scenes. In the background are the same people as before. The man on the left and the older man reading the newspaper with the young boy on the right. In the right foreground we see a young man eating spaghetti with a fork. This time the people are shown from a different angle. A waiter comes into the picture from the right carrying a plate of spaghetti and a cup of Milktea. He stops, turns and places the plate on a table. Strangely, it is a different waiter than before. He is beardless, wears a T-shirt and an apron over it. In this brief moment, Florence Lee addresses different qualities of time. We have the four daily moments that speak of people's habits and rituals as simultaneous repetition: The same restaurant, the same table, the same food, the same neighbours. As if one could escape the transience of life by changing as little as possible and strictly adhering to rituals. This duration of time is interrupted by the single action of the waiter. Since the rituals consist of many individual moments, one such moment is highlighted here. The moment when the food is put on the table. A special moment we are waiting for. And yet something is different this time.A zoom goes to the plate with the spaghetti, through it and lands on a roof with a bamboo construction. Squeezed between two other buildings in purple and blue, you see six workers, in blue coats and yellow construction helmets carrying single bamboo poles. The bamboo is the same colour as the spaghetti. The muffled noise of jackhammers and construction machinery can be heard. The square grids of the building structure, somehow reminiscent of cages or prison cells, show five motionless construction workers. The moment seems cut out of time. We are exactly in the middle of the 147 seconds. A single construction worker moves down the steps to the next level. He walks slowly. He leaves the level of construction and and goes underground. He carries a bamboo pole and places it on the ground. His part in the construction (life) is over. Cut. Again a house from the outside. Again a lighted window. It is still night. We see a person standing in front of an illuminated screen. A long-lasting snapshot that shows how much our lives are now shaped by screens. Another cut. The inside of the restaurant. Deserted. Inanimate. Another cut. Now an almost abstract painting. Between the fan and the table lies a kind of leaf. From a plant. You can clearly see the leaf veins. The lying leaf is a dead or dying plant. It irritates me that the story is broken up like this. A strong moment in an unusual colourfulness. Florence Lee's colourfulness is a colourfulness found in paintings of the informal painting of the 1940-1950s, especially lyrical and gestural abstraction. Muted colours in darker shades are interrupted by a few garish orange and yellow colours. Works by Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages, Willi Baumeister or Clifford Still run through my mind. But I also see the painterly melancholy of a Paul Klee in these wonderfully composed moods. ('Klee' appeals to me particularly in this context, as the artist also uses this in her email address). In the next cut, in the midst of infinitely dark blue, the portrait of an air conditioner behind bars. And already we are back in the restaurant and see the hatch to the kitchen. Cut. The noise of the restaurant has us again. From above, our plate of spaghetti. A right hand reaches for the yellow corn kernels with chopsticks and places them one by one on the table next to the plate on the right. Panning to the corn kernels we count 9, 10, then 11 and as the 12th corn kernel falls on the table it turns into a yellow construction worker's helmet and lands with a thud next to more yellow construction worker's helmets. The yellow helmet spins and slowly rolls out and there comes that moment that gives me the creeps: the sound kicks in. If this moment of the rolling helmet (head) is already a very strong one, the end can hardly be described linguistically. We are back in the restaurant. The room is empty. One of three tables has already been folded down. It has seven stools. In the centre of the seat, a vibrating orange spot, almost like a flickering light standing on a grave. On the right, leaf veins. They are bleeding. Slowly the blinds go down and close the window. Even though we can't see anything anymore, we still know what happened back then. I live in Hong Kong and I feel the melancholy of this city and the pain and loneliness of its people. Some are phantoms. We will not forget them. Because we are elephants living in a tower.
During the summer of 2021, Florence LEE completed another version of her animation Elephant in Castle. This one is partly based on the older version I already described, but extends it by several sequences. The new version is now 286 seconds long and thus almost twice as long as the original version. Comparing the two, it is noticeable that the newer version has much more silent and dynamic moments and the story is told in a different order. Pretty much in the middle of the animation comes the scene in which the falling yellow corn kernels turn into yellow helmets. But then follows a longer sequence showing a person running away with a yellow helmet on a bridge. A clever transition transforms linearly arranged streaks of color into the lights of a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, the noise of a demo is heard and the person already introduced runs along dark corridors, stairs and tunnels. Two hands reach out to each other. Underneath the yellow helmets you can see the protective masks. Finally, the helping hand lets go, causing our protagonist to fall backwards. Now follow several graphically finely done strongly colored sequences that show a confrontation and possibly an inner conflict. This culminates in a strong red monochrome. In addition, the noise of the street and heavy breathing can be heard again and again. A cut and we are back at the construction site. From there a scene change back to the restaurant. It is dripping. We hear birds chirping and the shutters close the view of the restaurant. Somehow everything seems the same and yet it is all different. This second version has moved away from the melancholic mood that was the hallmark of the first version. Now we are dealing more with a chronicle of events that took place in 2019 and repeated almost daily for several months. The story has become more explicit in its message and takes a position directly. Now the protagonist, who is active in construction during the day, but underground at night, is directly in the center. Both animations illuminate the events and tell their story in different ways. The older animation hints at some things, is more emotional, and leaves more room for individual interpretation. The younger animation thrives on the tension of contrasting lives by day and night, fitting in on the job, and camaraderie in moments of danger. Both animations complement each other perfectly and underpin young artist Florence LEE's reputation as a great storyteller of what happened in Hong Kong in 2019.
Harald Kraemer, 2021