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How artist has turned forgotten Hong Kong novels into new digital art and online experiences

  • Hung Keung’s ‘It All Begins With a Word’ project, with animation, video and interactive games, re-examines old stories and poems at ReNew Vision
  • Work of five local and international new media creatives feature on this month’s New Vision Art Festival’s transitional online platform amid Covid-19 outbreak

In partnership with:Leisure and Cultural Services Department
Reading Time:6 minutes
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New media artist Hung Keung’s ‘It All Begins With a Word’ project, which sees him transform forgotten works by renowned Hong Kong authors and poets into digital art, including animation and video, form’s part of this month’s New Vision Art Festival’s online platform, ReNew Vision.

Literature has long inspired other art forms. Nineteenth-century painter Sir John Everett Millais famously depicted, on canvas, the tragic death of Shakespearean character Ophelia, in Hamlet, in his eponymous painting.

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Many of the longest running Broadway shows such as The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked and Les Miserables were all inspired by literary classics.

In 2010, a “sculptural” book called Tree of Codes was published, created by bestselling American author Jonathan Safran Foer, who cut up his “favourite book” by Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles from 1934, and removed words from it to carve out a new story.

British choreographer Wayne McGregor created an immersive, free-form balletic performance based on American author Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘sculptural’ book, ‘Tree of Codes’.
British choreographer Wayne McGregor created an immersive, free-form balletic performance based on American author Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘sculptural’ book, ‘Tree of Codes’.

Foer’s work was subsequently adopted by contemporary British choreographer Wayne McGregor to create an immersive, free-form balletic performance of the same name.

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Imagination and creativity beyond words

Artists closer to home are also using new media to create powerful experiences. Hong Kong-based installation artist Tsang Kin-wah, whose work was exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale, for instance, creates immersive video-based installations in which provocative words from philosophical texts snake around viewers from floor to ceiling.
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