Ellen Pau: The Shape of Light

EVENT DESCRIPTION

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, is delighted to announce a brand-new moving image work by pioneering Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau, co-commissioned with Art Basel. The work, titled The Shape of Light, will be shown on the M+ Facade from Friday, 20 May 2022 until Sunday, 19 June 2022 at 7 to 9pm daily. The project marks the first major collaborative commission for the M+ Facade since M+’s opening in November 2021.

Supported by UBS, Lead Partner of Art Basel, The Shape of Light is a site-specific moving image work made specially for the M+ Facade. Using digitally animated special effects, the video explores the possibilities of the immaterial and the material, transforming light into digital objects. Featuring a popular sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, The Heart Sutra, here expressed through sign language, the ritualistic video meditates on the concept ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’. Natural phenomena like fire, water, and light are all rendered in awe-inspiring computer-generated animation.

Pau’s moving image work intertwines live-action performance and spectacular sci-fi sequences, delivering a one-of-a-kind experience for the Hong Kong audiences on the M+ Facade. In Pau’s words, the M+ Facade is a futuristic lighthouse ‘standing on the shores of West Kowloon like a guardian that shines a light to all travellers and homecomers’. The site-specific video is offered as a gesture of guidance and hope for audiences in Hong Kong, where ‘illumination from the M+ offices interlaces with an electronic glow from the video wall. Clusters of cells and pixels merge with the building’s architecture, forming a new cultural observatory to the place artists call home.’

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Pau is a leading figure in the city’s media art scene whose works have been exhibited locally and internationally since the 1980s. Pau is known for exploring the intersection of visual-art languages with the latest technologies. She takes inspiration from new media to examine ever- evolving notions of self and the changing times in which we live.

Ellen Pau shares her excitement on the co-commission, ‘I am delighted to have created The Shape of Light for M+ and Art Basel to be displayed on the M+ Facade. I cannot think of a better site to show this video work which is created for Hong Kong and its people. I hope The Shape of Light can convey a healing message to the city.’

M+ and Art Basel will present a series of public programmes, including a live durational performance, an artist talk, and an online screening following the debut of The Shape of Light.

Complementing the display of The Shape of Light on M+ Facade, M+ and Art Basel will also present a series of free online and offline events, making the artwork more accessible to the public.

The Shape of Light live performance by Ellen Pau, in collaboration with Amy Chan (lighting designer), Quinn Wong (producer/livecoder), and Paul Yip (sound artist), will offer a space of healing, using sound, light, and digital objects. The drop-in performance will run from 5 to 8pm on Friday, 27 May 2022 at The Forum, M+.

Ellen Pau will be in dialogue with Ulanda Blair about her new work, The Shape of Light at a talk and screening. Attendees will here have the rare opportunity to experience some of Pau’s past works made between 1988 and 2015. The talk will take place from 2 to 3:30pm on Saturday, 28 May 2022 at the M+ Grand Stair, M+.

A four-day online screening from Sunday, 29 May to Wednesday, 1 June 2022 will enable local and international audiences to view a collection of Ellen Pau’s pioneering videos and installations made between 1988 and 2015. Each video will include an audio commentary by Pau, describing the ideas and inspiration behind her work.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Ellen Pau (born 1961) is an artist who aims to raise our awareness of our physical presence and inspire contemplation of what it means to be, to exist, here and now, and beyond that, the space each of us occupies.

Pau became one of the earliest pioneering video artists in Hong Kong. For Pau, the inspiration she takes from new media is used to examine the self and the times we are living in, ever-shifting and evolving. Beyond artistic creation, Pau has also been a leader in the promotion, curation and education of art and culture in Hong Kong, through the founding of several important initiatives. This includes Hong Kong’s oldest video artist collective and earliest archive for media art, Videotage, co-founded in 1986. She also founded Microwave International New Media Arts Festival in 1996.