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Video and soundtrack by Ashley Leung. Voice and words recorded from English Dictionary mobile app. Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/ashbomb-1/10-min-bitch-track As a potential installation, "Couple Bitching" (2019) won the Honorary Mention Award at Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium in 2020. -------------------------------- In this modern society where everyone is on their phones, we cannot imagine how that has affected communication between couples. With craft materials, I created a model, a scenario which resembles a couple's dinner date. On the table, their dishes are smartphones, with "I love you" appearing on the screen, to which each of them responds "I love you" back as shown on the phone stuck at their mouth areas. Distracted by technology, they do not communicate with each other in the present, but are fully emerged in the digital world. What is important to note, is that the couple is genderless, which extends its association to everybody in the world despite their genders. Each face is painted with a mixture of yellow, blue, red, purple and green, giving off the feeling of a strange cyber-ness. With their diamond eyes, they become more robotic than human. The soundtrack is a compilation of definitions of words like "bitch" "dick" "dating" "relationship" "connection" "fuck off" "asshole" "shut up" from an English dictionary mobile app. It is to raise questions about what dating is in this modern world saturated with methods of digital communication. The couple here seems to be having a fight with each other in their heads, dissing their partner but never saying a word. They lack genuine communication even if they are facing each other. There is also a cheekiness in the track because of its highly robotic and mundane reading of offensive terms. Sarcasm is an important element here, especially when the dictionary robotically reads definitions of “dating”, “relationship” and “connection”. Are we really dating, maintaining a relationship, sustaining a connection? Or are we just looking like we are doing those things? Instructions with model: The "10-min Bitch Track" should be played over and over as long as there are visitors to the exhibition. That way, everybody near the model could hear the track. Alternatively, we could use two headphones, each of them connected to somewhere behind each chair in the dinner date model. This means that only two visitors could hear the track at a time. **Updated instructions without model: A dining table is set in the middle of the space. A chair is placed at the two furthest ends of the table. Before each chair on the table sits a cell phone on which the screen displays “i love u”. A green lamp is placed in the middle in reference to my performance “Text me till I can’t anymore” (2021) where I stayed up until 3am in the gallery space to text people who came to party and those who did not, while every message was publicly displayed. Headphones are connected to the phones. The audio “10-min Bitch Track” is played on repeat. Visitors are encouraged to sit in the chairs and wear headphones as they look at the person sitting across them or at the phone before them.

Video and soundtrack by Ashley Leung.

Video edited by Ashley Leung.

Video edited by Ashley Leung. Filmed at the exhibition "Gravitational Currents & The Life Magic (Susanne Winterling)" at Empty Gallery HK.

Video and soundtrack by Ashley Leung. Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/ashbomb-1/am-big-u-ous Cover of original song Fei Wong - 曖昧