C. Spencer Yeh’s "Shocking Asia" Is As Un-Shocking As Most Of The Art I Saw In 2017

It was cool, but not as cold as it is now in New York when I went to go visit C. Spencer Yeh in November at his studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The studio is in an industrial building behind a store called Futonland. Yeh greeted me at the door, and led me up to his space, which was crowded with computer screens and electronic equipment. There, we got lost for a while in the footage for “Shocking Asia,” a seven-hour video work on view in an installation at The Empty Gallery in Hong Kong through February 10, 2018.

C. Spencer Yeh

C. Spencer Yeh, Shocking Asia, 2017. Digital video, color, sound, approx. 442 minutes.

Yeh created the work in 2016 while on honeymoon with his wife in Southeast Asia. His intention at the outset was not to work on the trip, but by the third day of travel, he was already shooting footage with his smartphone. “It just became really clear that something had to happen,” he told me.

Yeh is a performance artist, musician and filmmaker best known for his spare, abstract vocal and violin performances, which he has staged at the Kitchen in New York, and at festivals in Cairo and Athens, among other venues.

C. Spencer Yeh

C. Spencer Yeh, Shocking Asia, 2017. Digital video, color, sound, approx. 442 minutes.

Watching the footage he took on his honeymoon, I felt the sense of claustrophobia I often feel when I travel to a new place — as if I need to be focused on capturing the best possible footage of the place so that I can transform it into something for my own benefit. An Instagram photograph, or a blog post. I want to take places that are familiar to others, and create something from them that prove my worth as a writer, a photographer, and an artist. Because I want to cannibalize every new place I visit with my gaze, I never truly enjoy being anywhere.

C. Spencer Yeh

C. Spencer Yeh, Shocking Asia, 2017. Digital video, color, sound, approx. 442 minutes.

I’m not saying Yeh feels the same, but watching the footage for “Shocking Asia,” I felt anxiety about it needing to reveal something about Yeh — who he is as a person, how good he is at capturing a place with a camera, and how much better he might be at that than I am. Yeh cited many sources of influences for his film, among them mondo films, which are documentary films that explore subjects such as murder and sex with the intent of shocking, and conversations he had with his wife on their honeymoon, in which they discussed what it means to be tourists in countries with histories of colonialism.