Hong Kong Palace Museum | No Boundaries: Reinterpreting Palace Museum Culture

7001. A Grandiose Fanfare

This work contains 31 audio channels, with a design that references a bell and jade chime on display in Gallery 1: “Entering the Forbidden City: Architecture, Collection, and Heritage”. These two instruments were crucial to the making of ceremonial court music in ancient China—the sound of bells usually appears in the beginning of a piece, with jade chimes playing at the end. The instruments appear to denote the structure of the music, a connection that inspired the creation of A Grandiose Fanfare.

The artist, Gaybird Leung, chose red and gold as the main colour scheme for the installation to give the work a celebratory feeling. After selecting an audio recording of a fireworks display in Hong Kong, the artist used balloons to mimic the sound of fireworks, which were then digitally manipulated to create a homophony that resembles celebratory music. Expanding the definition of sound, the work encourages visitors to experience various sonic images and meanings.

7002. Waving Script

Chris Cheung’s performative kinetic installation, Waving Script, was designed to resonate with the Yuan dynasty calligraphic work Hasty Writing in Draft-Cursive Script, on view in the Gallery 8 exhibition "The Making of Masterpieces: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from the Palace Museum", which runs until October 2022. Cheung’s work features a robotic arm that rewrites the entire work of 1,394 characters, encouraging visitors to experience the artistic expression of calligraphy from a fresh perspective.

As a novel way to present calligraphy, Waving Script aims to explore future possibilities, interpretive methods, and writing platforms for the art form. The word "waving" represents the rhythmic fluctuations of brain waves, encouraging visitors to picture the idea of communicating through brain waves rather than words in the future. The installation’s dynamic trajectory resembles a circle at first glance, but it is in fact writing in 360 degrees, simulating the exchange of informatics in the human brain. The artist invites you to rethink the future of text communication methods while viewing the work.

7003. Clock of Nature

This mechanical installation, Clock of Nature, was inspired by timepieces from the collection of the Qing court. It is made up of two major components: the first is a multi-layered circular installation that makes up the clock, while the second consists of two rows of bronze bells hanging at the back, which tells the time. The top layer of the circular component is the mechanical core, the centre layer reflects the traditional clock structure, and the outer layer is the indices. The installation features the balance wheel and escapement seen in ordinary clocks, but the balance wheel rotates irregularly, departing from the punctuality that we expect in a timepiece and presenting a state of chaos.

The artist, Joseph Chan, believes that both order and chaos can be observed in natural systems. Chaotic events seem unpredictable, yet are never random. When a chaotic system starts, all that follows is predestined, like the butterfly effect. Hence, he named the piece Clock of Nature, which echoes the force of nature.

7004. Visualising the Universe through a Thousand Things

Hung Keung’s installation Visualising the Universe through a Thousand Things aims to express the cosmology and spatial concepts used in Chinese paintings on three levels. 

The first level, "three distances", explores how traditional Chinese paintings and artists’ imaginations transcend the constraints of the two-dimensional plane. The concept integrates multiple perspectives in time and space, namely "high distance", "deep distance", and "level distance", inviting visitors to appreciate landscape paintings from various angles. 

The concept of a parallel universe is introduced on the second level. While appreciating the landscape painting, viewers immerse themselves in both the real and virtual spaces. What is the relation between the viewer and the scenery? Are they merely spectators or active participants? Who is on the inside and who is on the outside? Or do both worlds exist simultaneously? 

The third level focuses on the concept of cosmology in Chinese paintings. A cyclical, rather than coincidental pattern, brings out the powerful view that all that exist in the universe are fleeting and impermanent.

7005. And the Rest is Stardust

Resembling a tunnel, with a square entrance and a circular exit, Phoebe Hui’s multisensory installation And the Rest is Stardust recreates a star-filled cosmic space with two types of projections. The design is inspired by the traditional Chinese cosmological belief of tianyuan difang—that heaven is a dome that covers the square earth. The artist also connects this work to the long history of the Palace Museum’s architecture, which has a special connection to astronomy.  

The concept of tianyuan difang was applied to architectural aesthetics as early as the Song dynasty. Overlooked for hundreds of years, the significance of Chinese astronomy was only recognised in the twentieth century, and it continues to have a profound impact on the global astronomy studies. 

Looking up, you can see the starry sky reconstructed based on the star map by Su Song, a scientist of the Song dynasty, and data from astronomical archives. At the same time, projections of the modern starry night appear on both sides of the tunnel. The artist invites visitors to enjoy the beautiful starry sky and be inspired by the wisdom of the ancients.  

7006. Objectification

At the far end of the gallery is a dark room that houses Objectification. Here, around 300 3D printed objects hang in the air or anchored to the ground. If they look familiar, it is because they are all modelled after exhibits on display in the Museum.

The artist, Ng Tsz-Kwan, has simplified the objects by stripping them of colour, decoration, and accompanying historical information. Without these details, or their usual contexts of display in individual showcases, the antiquities revert to their fundamental state as objects. In this way, the artist presents them in a new light—instead of surrounding the exhibits, visitors are instead enveloped by them.

Five moving lights installed on the wall move back and forth along tracks, directing the gaze of visitors to different parts of the space. Objectification invites us to contemplate alternative meanings for the exhibits. Was the means of displaying an object in the past predetermined at the time of its  creation? Has this changed over time?