Curator Helena Halim used to have a seashell collection that hung in a bag in her bedroom. It was left behind when her family moved away from Hong Kong but it had made an indelible impression on her, and came to symbolise her childhood growing up in the city.
That was the story she told seven artists as she prompted them to create works for a group exhibition called “Fragments of Curiosities” at the Hart Haus art studio in Hong Kong’s Kennedy Town. The result is a coherent collection of new works that explore the idea of objects being vessels for our memories.
Two artists used found objects from around Hong Kong to represent their connection to the places they live in.
Daniel Stempfer’s home and studio is in Tai Kok Tsui, in Kowloon. The area has seen great change over the last 70 years: originally an “island” connected to the Kowloon Peninsula by a narrow strip, it was fully absorbed into the peninsula when land reclamation filled in the sea around it, becoming a district of working-class tenements and factories. Now, it is being transformed by urban redevelopment.
Stempfer mirrors the district’s landscape in Habitat (W.I.D.S. – Jin’s Chasmanthium Chaffy Edit), a sculpture made of found acrylic sheets with a concrete base.
Seed pods from the flame of the forest tree (Delonix regia), a species introduced in Hong Kong from Africa during the city’s colonial era, and dried pampas grass are inserted into the sculpture. The result is an oddly evocative amalgam of nature and city, held together by neon lights as red as the flame of the forest tree’s flowers.