Law Yuk-mui is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator who lives and works between Chiba, Japan, and Hong Kong. Working primarily through expanded cinema, she adopts methodologies of field research to intervene in everyday urban spaces. Her practice attends to the physical traces of history, bodily memory, the marks of time, and the operations of power embedded within geographic space.

Sound serves as an anchor in Law’s work. Her work explores the political and cultural rhetoric of sound and acoustic memory, as well as the orchestration and interplay between sound, text, and visuals.

Law Yuk-mui was shortlisted for the Foundwork Artist Prize in 2021. She has also received the Awards for Young Artist (Media Art category) at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, and the Excellence Award (Media Art category) at the ifva Awards in 2018.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I actually began my artistic career quite late. My first solo exhibition, Victoria East (2017), was presented at Videotage in Hong Kong when I was thirty-five. Prior to that, I worked for five years at soundpocket, an independent sound art organisation, where I was responsible for The Library, an online public sound archive. Through this role, I had the opportunity to learn from many established sound artists, including Samson Young, Aiko Suzuki, and Yannick Dauby.

This experience deeply nurtured my practice. Beyond learning field-recording techniques, I began to understand how the senses align. Trained initially as a visual artist, I once perceived the world primarily through vision, rarely approaching it through listening. As a result, my early video works contained no sound, partly because I did not yet know how to work with this medium.

I gradually began incorporating field recordings into my work. Since Song of the Exile in 2022, sound and listening have become a way for me to approach history. Over time, this has grown into a sustained interest in acoustic memory and the political and cultural rhetoric of sound.

What is your creative process like? Do you follow a routine or work spontaneously? 

In Hong Kong, I often described myself as not a studio-based artist. I needed to leave the studio in order to develop my work, and as a result, much of my earlier practice involved extensive fieldwork.

Since 2022, I have relocated to Japan. I don’t have a driver’s licence here, so I now spend much more time working in my home studio. This shift has enabled new forms of experimentation, such as using archival images as input for AI-generated sound.

I usually begin working at nine in the morning and continue until four in the afternoon. Sometimes, I return to work again in the evening. I build my work slowly, accumulating it day by day. This is how I work now. I believe that time is a mother, and that work needs time to be distilled, to accumulate, and to take shape.

You often work through “expanded cinema.” What does this form allow you to explore that traditional film or single-channel video cannot?

My primary concern is how audiences perceive and engage with my work. In a single-channel format, viewers are positioned in front of a screen and guided through a largely linear narrative. Multi-channel video allows for multiple narrative threads and shifting points of view, while expanded cinema allows me to work with the full space, inviting viewers into spatial and temporal encounters that go beyond the screen itself.

In Song of the Exile (2022), I treated the exhibition space as a hybrid of a film studio and a cinema, staging the mise-en-scène live in front of the audience. Viewers were free to move through the space, as performative bodies, sculptural elements, and moving images charged the environment, allowing the work to remain deliberately open and unstable. This openness can be challenging both for viewers and for myself as an artist.

Your work intervenes in the mundane rhythms of the city. What inspired you to use everyday spaces as sites of artistic inquiry?

Rhythm is not only found in cities; rural landscapes also have their own rhythms, and each body carries its own rhythm as well. For one of my recent video works, I drew the subtitle from Rain and the Rhinoceros by Thomas Merton, in which he reflects on listening to rain while alone in a hermitage, contrasting this natural sound with the engineered rhythms of modern life.

This text resonated deeply with me and recalls a way of seeing informed by Landscape Theory (風景論), articulated in the late 1960s by the Japanese photographer Nakahira Takuma. This perspective rejects the neutrality of the everyday environment and instead foregrounds how seemingly ordinary spaces are shaped by hidden structures of power, violence, and instability.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

One of the ongoing challenges in my practice is sustaining long-term, research-based creation. My work often unfolds over extended periods and is not easily supported by sales alone. As I am not currently represented by a gallery, I primarily sustain my practice through commissions, institutional collaborations, and project-based funding.

In recent years, working between Hong Kong and Japan across different cultural and administrative contexts, including visa status and funding eligibility, has encouraged me to rely less on government funding and to seek support through alternative funding sources.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

My current project, Lilt of Yu, is a collaboration with dancer Joseph Lee and percussionist Lam Yip. The choreographic concept draws from Yubu (禹步), a Daoist stepping pattern associated with celestial order. Interwoven with taiko drums and cloud gongs, the work forms a sonic ritual space that explores thresholds between the human and the animistic world.

Situated between Hong Kong and Japan, my practice has become increasingly attentive to liminality and thresholds. In dialogue with my ongoing interest in orchestrating relationships between sound, text, and image, this focus continues to shape the direction of my work.

Text & photo courtesy of Law Yuk-mui

Website: https://www.lawyukmui.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawyukmui/?hl=en