2023, Public Installation
Platystomata Poisoned @ Southmere Lake
Unsounded
2022, Open source installation network
Every morning I wake up, I leave the apartment building, walk along Fa Yuen Street, turn into Soy Street before Sai Yi Street Garden, then turn left to Sai Yi Street, then Shantung St, then Yim Po Fong St. Finally, I arrive at Mongkok East Train Station and take the train to school. And at night I follow the same path but in reverse to get home.
Walking through the streets countless times makes me numb to the surroundings. Everything seems to be so since time immemorial. One day on my way I heard a ship whistle. Suddenly I felt lost for a while, and I could not recognize if I was in Mongkok or Tai Kok Tsui. The sudden confusion was like a spike. I started to pay attention to the shops and people on the streets again. And I found some shops I never noticed and some new neighbors I never met.
Unsounded is a project that makes the spikes. With many small installations that work as knots, it creates a network for sound to travel from one location to another in the local area. The project is also open-source, making it possible for people to participate in making and distributing the devices in their neighborhoods.
Join the project, and create sound portals in your town. Maybe you just help someone to rediscover the community that they have been living in.
Visit the project website here.
Exhibition at Singing Wave Gallery, Run Run Shao Creative Media Center: 21/4/2022 – 28/4/2022
NO Billing No Compromise
2021, Streets Art
With Karlie ZHAO, Nickola Antolkovic, Scout XU
The limitation of behaviours in public spaces from the government seems to be a common and normal component in modern communities. However, if we observe at different cities with the focus of signs in public areas, we may find that their content is highly sensitive to the urban context, leading us to reflect on the definition of “public space”, and to question the normality of these oppressive public signs. After collecting rich language materials from the streets in field trips and research, we designed a series of posters and stickers, trying to mock the nonsensical governmental road signs/banners in public spaces. We hope that the posters and stickers will serve as a voice from the public that indirectly responds to the authoritative, centralised power from the government.
Click here to visit the project website.
Part of the Social Transformation Theme under Shared Campus
Over Growth
(proposal) Video for ICC tower, 2020
“The crazily spreading vines on the building are the sweet revenge on the expanding urban area that is nibbling the wild.”
Animated images, generated according to special algorithms, as an abstract representation of how giant vines might possibly grow on the skyscraper’s surfaces are shown on the surfaces via the facade.
By making the vines climbing on ICC tower, I want to address the conflicts between human and nature, urban and wild, us and the other. The images remind us a possible ending of the conflicts, a future that we fail to build a harmony relationship with nature.
Nature always wins. We are all just a part of it.
City Dream|Global Village 全球村｜城市夢
(proposal) Public Installation, 2020
As a original resident of a village in the city(城中村) that has spent almost his whole life outside the village, I am, somehow, obsessed with the create density of the village in the city, and the huge contrast between the village and the city around it. The village in the city is the Mainland version of Kowloon Walled City, with the aesthetic of dystopia, where is, however, the place for dream.
By this work I want to create a window, a bridge, an opportunity for two completely different groups of people to have a view of something they might have never seen in their life. The tenants in the village can hardly imagine that people living in the same city, just a kilometer away, can afford abroad travels twice a year. What does the outside world looks like? Those who travel abroad every year, might have no idea that there is still people living in such an environment, in the village, although the village is just a kilometer away from their home. They live in the same city, but in two universes.
We have seen so many cyberpunk cities in movies and novels, Guangzhou (and many cities in Mainland) might just become one in the future. Urbanization always shows its bright side to us, and leave the dark side in shadow. It promises with the stories of the minor that realized their city dreams, so we often ignore the major of the new immigrants who are the loser in the game, struggling in the edge, under the shadow of the CBD towers.
But they have not submitted, they still have their dreams, and that is enough for them to be admirable.
If you are a potential sponsor, click here for the budget or contact me @ real.john.chueng@gmail.com