Urban Media Art as Social Mediation in Hong Kong
Interest in urban media art has been on the rise over the last decade. The form has been used in art festivals such as Lumiere Vancouver and Lumiere Hong Kong as large-scale spectacles and tourism promotion campaigns. A critical question is whether they actually contribute to the urban environment or only add another layer of gloss over the city’s façade as “urban cosmetics.” (Benayoun and Bares, 2016)
Can urban media art function as a medium of mediation and bring about new understanding for:
- revealing forgotten or covered history?
- exposing crucial elements in our environment that have nonetheless sunk into oblivion?
- cultural diplomacy that serves to alleviate social partisanship?
This lecture will use the emerging discourse on urban media as its point of departure and contextualise it with the situation of Hong Kong. In a city known for its sensory overload, can urban media art take an alternative path?
Speaker
Kingsley Ng is an assistant professor in Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is an inter-disciplinary artist and designer with a focus on site-specific and participatory projects. His creative practices are driven by a belief that art can be socially relevant and transformative. Recent projects include Twenty-Five Minutes Older, a commission by Art Basel which takes the audience on a camera obscura moving tram, and After the Deluge, presented in an underground storm-water tank the size of 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
His work has been shown to critical acclaim at prominent international venues such as Guangzhou Triennial, the Shanghai Expo, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial Japan, Milan Design Week and various exhibitions in France, Italy and Australia. He is the recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Best Artist Award (Media Arts) in 2013, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2013, and a Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Award in 2009.
Ng holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in New Media from Ryerson University, Canada; a Master of Science degree in Sustainable Design from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and Post-Diplôme avec les félicitations du jury à l’unanimité from Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, France. He has served as an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts of Hong Kong Baptist University since 2015.
SPONSORS
- SFU International
- David See-chai Lam Centre
- Institute For Transpacific Cultural Research
Date
Tuesday, October 1, 2019
Time
5:30 - 8:30pm
Place
SFU Segal Building, Ground Floor
500 Granville Street, Vancouver
This event is free but registration is required.