Programme Postponement Notice
The programme “Pak Sheung Chuen: Wandering on the Borders of the Map” to be held on 12 Dec 2020 has been postponed until further notice. Thank you for your understanding.
The camera lens slides down from an elevation. It captures a crowd of people arranged in a horizontal line, shovelling the soil from one side of the mountain to the other. Francis Alÿs titled this work When Faith Moves Mountains (2002). Seen from a cartographic point of view, people are merely tiny points on a page, but when combined, their power is enough to move mountains. Another work by Alÿs, The Green Line (2004), also makes use of maps: using a can of paint, he created a green line that runs through Jerusalem, based on an armistice border drawn on a map between Israel and its neighbours in 1948.
Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and game gathers for the first time in Hong Kong important recent works by Francis Alÿs, one of the most influential conceptual artists of our time. The exhibition is intimately tied to the theme of borders and games in Alÿs’ artmaking. Pak Sheung Chuen is a Hong Kong artist who often incorporates maps into his art. In an exhibition about Francis Alÿs entitled I'm Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs (2010), Pak presented a map of “Kokubunji-shi Kunitachi-shi” in Japan, where he embarked on a journey along the borders of the map and called it Invisible Travel (2007), using the map itself to be taken to a spot not visible on the map, in order to respond to Alÿs’ conceptual and creative approach. In workshop Wandering on the Borders of the Map, Pak Sheung Chuen will take us inside of an old map of Central, Hong Kong, to invisible places on the map’s border, as we slowly stroll along the border line and explore the surroundings. Participants can listen to pieces of history and complete small tasks, filling in blank spaces on the map as well re-developing a street that does not yet exist on the map. Experience a journey of art and history with us!
