Here and There: Re-imagining Hong Kong Landscapes

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Here and There: Re-imagining Hong Kong Landscapes explores the accumulated meanings and values attached to Hong Kong landscapes and the intimate relationships and emotive bonds between people, landscapes, artistic geographical imagination, and sense of place. This place-based exhibition invited Ho Yuen Leung, Koon Wai Bong, Lam Tung Pang, Leung Ka Yin Joey, Wong Chun Hei Stephen, and Wong Lai Ching Fiona, to explore six sites, namely, Victoria Peak, Pok Fu Lam, Kowloon Mountain Ranges, Yuen Long, the peripheral islands, and the Hong Kong Island cityscape, that have long been ascribed historical and cultural value and have dominated the travel discourse of Hong Kong since the nineteenth century.

To extend the spatial and temporal dimensions of the artists’ landscape imagination, the curator, Dr. Ting Wing Yan, Vivian built an archive on Hong Kong landscapes and provided the artists with archival research support. Through various mediums and art forms, including ceramic, installation, mixed media, moving image, painting, and sculpture, the artists transformed their landscape perceptions and imaginations into six newly commissioned artworks, which not only reveal the artists’ personal landscape experiences and encounters but also express various relations between the artists and Hong Kong landscapes. The exhibition offers multiple readings of the six sites through different creative approaches adopted by the artists, examining the inextricable bonds between people and place. The artists reinterpret cultural connotations of the landscapes and their significance in our times, inviting audiences to reflect on emotions, memories, and imaginations embodied by the places.

“The curatorial team believes the exhibition to be a platform for the exchange of ideas, and a realm for the public and art to create meaning together. The six artists consider the scenery to be a medium to be understood and remembered, to imagine the place and respond to it with art, for an interpretation of local scenery by different generations. What this exhibition presents to the audience is the artists’ and the curatorial team’s sense of imagination and hope. Its meaning lies beyond just the creative works, connecting the public to the shared memories of landscape.” (Dr. Ting Wing Yan, Vivian’s curatorial statement)