“Boats, islands, human beings… Three inter-dependent elements, forming an unbreakable trilateral relationship.” – “The Island Tales”

Art film “The Island Tales” captured the close-ended nature of an island as a metaphor for the end of a century. In 2000, concepts such as “anthropocene”, “non-human agency” and materiality have yet become prominent academic terms, but the film predicted how easily our human lives fly by in a befuddled, hazy state, like a drunken dream.

During the days when tunnels, bridges and railways have yet to exist, kaitos weave between shores of constellation-like islands and the New Territories. Transportation routes, designed to aggravate towards the city center, limited the exchange between humans and objects to the dichotomy of urban and rural, stifling the openness of the ocean. Setting off from the seaside of the islands, kaitos and cable ferries that sailed towards entangled directions linked up village with village, as well as village with towns. This interconnection allowed the islands to be inter-dependent without the need to rely on the city as an intermediary.

As an introduction to the study of kaito, our team began our study in Peng Chau, looking back at her connections with other islands, as well as the humans, events and objects it carried. Aside from the city, where else can the islands head towards?

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photo credit: 大白村子弟花炮會