Chi Po-Hao, a current ACT graduate student, is currently being featured in the Very Natural Actions Exhibition at the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong through the end of December.
His work, Lightscape, is a generative music project that transforms nocturnal lights into sound. With the city as the interface, the light and noise that an individual experiences when transversing urban streets are isolated and then recomposed, programming visual and auditory feedback and converting such lightscapes into musical compositions. By way of lights, shadows, and sound that reproduce the city’s nightscape, it is possible to observe its external and internal rhythm, and through it explore correlations between the individual, environment, and perception. This current iteration is Chi Po-Hao’s documentation of light and shadow during his residency in Gijon. The musical component is generated by mixing changing light conditions as audience members move around along with other elements, causing the music to constantly change throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Very Natural Actions encourages viewers not to linger on the surfaces of works but to seek out that gem of a tree within the forest of forms and meanings—one that resonates with one’s experiences, allowing artworks to serve as bridges between artists and viewers. Beneath the artworks lie worlds and dimensions ordinarily hidden; such reflexive questioning holds out greater possibilities in the viewing of artworks.
Very Natural Actions extends the artistic discussions in A Tree Fell in the Forest, and No One’s There from last year, presented as part of the “Emerging Curators Project” at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, parallel to the Shanghai Biennale. While the previous exhibition focused on the works that formed after the artists peered out at the world, Very Natural Actions explores the relation between an art object and the practice that results in the art object, offering a cross-section of themes and impulses from these relatively younger and emerging artists from Hong Kong, the Mainland, and Taiwan.
The exhibition will run from Sept 22 – Dec 31, 2019 in Hong Kong.