Tai Kwun Contemporary’s Residency Programme expands the depth of its education and public programmes and creates a far-reaching network of artists, curators, researchers, writers and academics that encourages interdisciplinary collaborations as well as contributing to a flourishing art scene in Hong Kong, enabling professionals to develop their practices and to benefit from the network of Tai Kwun and its partners.
The Open Call for Artists’ Studio 2019-20, a pilot project for the Residency Programme, targeted emerging artists or creative professionals from Hong Kong and beyond who work in time-based, intangible or less traditional artistic formats such as performances, videos, social interventions, books, writing, research-based practices, conceptual art, AI/VR and more. The selected artists are Chan Wai Lap (artist), Charles Kwong (composer), Jess Lau Ching-wa (artist) and o!sland (artist collective).
Please stay tuned to Tai Kwun website for information on upcoming Artists' Studio Open Calls.
Tai Kwun Contemporary welcomes Dorothy Wong Ka Chung and Benjamin Ryser (o!sland) to our Artists’ Studio Programme. Living with (and sometimes collaborating with) communities in different countries, they use images, videos, sound, texts, and stories to piece together artworks that grapple with contemporary society from a personal perspective and raise questions about the future we share.
For the project ‘Searching for a Place Where Light Belongs’, o!sland starts from images of light and shadow, and uses them as a medium for storytelling. At the centre is the perspective of community—they weave the stories of individuals in a community to gain deeper insights into our times and the history that led to it. They also explore the relationship between images, urban space, and sound. With a poetic approach, o!sland seeks ways in which images permeate everyday life and become an expressive medium within communities. Most importantly, o!sland would like to open up themselves to comprehend the view of different generations in Hong Kong on brightness and darkness by means of field research and interviews. They will then tell the stories through images (family albums/ newly created images) and voice recordings.
Their research focuses on experiences of postcolonialism, sense of belonging, identity shifts, and experiences of distance. In recent years, the collective has been living with and engaging the Truku aboriginal tribe in Taiwan, a community of immigrants in Zurich, as well as communities in Hong Kong. The form and time scope of o!sland's work shifts with the people and the environment of the community they live in. They aim to find alternative places for images, videos and sound outside traditional art spaces, often creating site-specific and interactive artworks. They have for instance made works incorporating family albums deserted in an attic, radios hung in the middle of a field, and memories at the bottom of people’s hearts.