“When I pressed down into the clay, it felt like I was giving it a heart.”

Tan Xuejiao, participant


In 2003, British sculptor Antony Gormley invited some 300 residents of Xiangshan village (now Huadong Town in Guangzhou city) to make approximately 200,000 sculptures out of locally sourced clay. He offered only three simple instructions: each figurine was to be hand-sized, capable of standing upright, and have two eyes looking just above the horizon. Otherwise, each maker was free to improvise on their own.

In the end, the sculptures would be assembled into a sea of upward-turned faces, a ‘field’ that reflected the mass of humanity and the region's vast territory. The collective work, titled Asian Field, would go on to tour China and sites around the world before entering the M+ Collections in 2015.

As Pauline Yao (Lead Curator, Visual Art) and young local art practitioners readied the installation for display at Antony Gormley: Asian Field in 2021, the artist and some of the original makers looked back on what the experience of moulding this mass of figures meant to them, accompanied by archival footage of the production process and portraits by Zhang Hai’er.

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Join us online on 11 May with British sculptor Antony Gormley in the inaugural session of the M+ Lars Nittve Keynote Lecture Series.  Register now

Presenting Supporter of M+ Lars Nittve Keynote Lecture Series: The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Hong Kong
 

Video Transcript : Antony Gormley: Asian Field

“Nowadays, calligraphy seems to have little practical meaning in society. But we are interested in finding out what role calligraphy can still play in society.”

Zheng Guogu


Calligraphy Peach Blossom Garden (2004), for example, is a temporary garden installation. Calligraphy texts and Xuan paper have been transformed into a flowing river underneath a wooden bridge. The scene appears alongside fake peach trees and a wax waterfall. This meditative space subverts traditional methods of presenting calligraphy, reinventing the form through modern materials.

In this video interview, the three founders discuss how and why they started the collective, and their approach towards calligraphy as an art form.

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Video Transcript : Yangjiang Group: Subverting Calligraphy

“These designs still have a special, practical value in today's society.”

Vincent Au-yeung


In the manufacturing heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, Hong Kong’s plastic industry took off. From chopsticks to soap boxes, chairs to clocks, locally made products were innovative, affordable, and in-demand. Over time, brands like the Diana camera, Kader toys, and Red A plastic crystal would become household staples in Asia, Europe, and beyond.

In Hong Kong Plastic Pioneers, local manufacturers and their descendants recall the know-how, craftsmanship, and pluck required to get this once-thriving industry off the ground and promote the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ brand near and far.

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Video Transcript : Hong Kong Plastic Pioneers

“The images you see [on film] aren’t the same as what you’d see in real life . . . it most certainly involves emotions, memories, and your own experience.”

Anson Mak


In this interview, Hong Kong artist Anson Mak shares her love of Super 8 filmmaking, the many turns of her creative journey, and the significance of filming documentary works.

Mak’s documentaries may be rooted in reality, but they are permeated with poetry. Their interwoven text and images not only narrate the artist’s relationship to Hong Kong, but also borrow the stories of others to document the beauty of days past.

When she began creating video and sound art in the early 1990s, Mak focused her earliest works on gender and sexual orientation. But after a major illness in 1998, she shifted the focus to herself, contemplating the relationship between the individual and the city. Her works frequently centre on Hong Kong in flux, covering subjects like the redevelopment of her Kwun Tong neighbourhood, musicians who occupy industrial buildings, and the Hungry Ghost Festival.

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Video Transcript : Anson Mak: The Beauty of Days Past

“To paint is to create a space beyond words.”

Yeung Tong Lung

In 1990 Yeung Tong Lung established the Quart Society, now considered to have been the first autonomous art space in Hong Kong. It provided a platform for artists to show art outside of the mainstream and in particular to respond to the conditions of pre-handover, post-Tiananmen Hong Kong. As such, Yeung played a significant role in Hong Kong's avant-garde movement of the 1990s. Largely self-taught, he is part of a generation of artists recognised for their distinctly local response to modernism.

In this video, Yeung discusses different aspects of his practice—from abstract to figurative—and shares his thoughts about art and being an artist.

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Video Transcript : Yeung Tong Lung: A Space Beyond Words

“If you don’t give or take, what’s the point of life? If you give up something, the thing that you give up also shapes who you are.”

Leung Mee-ping


In the warehouse of Hong Kong artist Leung Mee-ping, you’ll find no shortage of discarded objects: boxes of sun-dried teabags and human hair, piles of stuffed animals, suitcases stuffed with sickness bags. Over the course of her career, Leung has collected thousands of these byproducts of human existence and repurposed them into artworks, finding meaning in the sheer scale of things that the world produces.

Leung takes M+ on a tour of her practice, from her warehouse space to community collection centres and landfills, reflecting along the way on the lifecycle of materials and the beauty that comes from sorting and understanding the things that we abandon.

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“Photographing in black and white offers me a sense of distance: a distance from real life. I think this kind of distance is important.”

Fan Ho
 

While much of the Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s captured by Fan Ho no longer exists, it can still be experienced through his photographs of the time.

The Early Years

Fan Ho (American, b. China, 1931–2016) was a photographer, film director, and actor. He spent his early years in Shanghai, where he began taking photographs after receiving his first camera at the age of fourteen. He moved to Hong Kong in 1949, and from the 1950s onwards gained considerable attention for his striking photographs of everyday life in Hong Kong.

From Photography to a Career in Film

Fan Ho’s skills in image-making in photography made him a natural fit for the emerging Hong Kong film industry. From the 1960s to the 1980s, he became better known for his work in film, in particular with the famous Shaw Brothers studio. In addition to his role behind the camera as a director, Fan Ho occasionally appeared in front of the camera, debuting as an actor in Love Without End (1961).

After a number of acting roles, Fan Ho produced his first independent short film, Big City Little Man (1963), which won an award at the Japan International Film Festival in 1964. Soon he was approached by commercial film studios and became highly successful in producing a new genre of films: erotic features. Films such as The Girl with the Long Hair (1975) and Temptation Summary (1990) were huge commercial successes.

Fan Ho’s Legacy

Fan Ho’s style of photography exemplifies what the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson dubbed the ‘decisive moment’. This method—of waiting for the perfect moment to click the camera shutter—is today considered a rather old-fashioned and even purist approach to photography. It remains a practice that is widely adopted by street photographers and photojournalists alike.

This video was originally published on M+ Stories. The English-language version of this article has been updated to reflect the artist’s name as Fan Ho, instead of Ho Fan, at the request of the artist’s estate.

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Video Transcript : Fan Ho: On the ‘Decisive Moment’