Women, art, and climate change inspire exhibition

30 Mar 2023

What comes to your mind when you hear “the end of the world”? Instead of showing what doomsday may look like, a new exhibition “Women at the End of the World” at the Academy of Visual Arts (AVA) explores the question: “How can we build the future with resilience, care and creativity?”

The exhibition, which opens from 8 March until 2 April at the HKBU AVA gallery on the University’s Kai Tak campus, takes place parallel to Art Basel Hong Kong. As one of the University Partners of the renowned art fair, AVA has a representative booth in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from 21 to 25 March.

In a time when climate change has impacted different sectors of society, both the exhibition on campus and the booth at Art Basel Hong Kong aim to inspire conversations about creating a culture of care, as well as caring for the environment and people.

Women and climate action

“I see ‘the end of the world’ as the end of a chapter, which can also mean the start of a new era,” says Dr Evelyn Kwok, Research Assistant Professor of AVA and Associate Director of Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Visual Arts, who led and curated the exhibition. “Living on a dying planet constantly challenges who we are, where and how we live. It is important to reignite curiosity, conduct constant observations and open transdisciplinary conversations about life on this planet we call home, and take bold and transformative action.”

She points out that climate change and environmental disasters have a profound impact on women and children, particularly in areas which are geographically vulnerable to volatile changes. “Women are often at the frontline of climate action, because social and cultural traditions have tasked them with duties of care, whether it is caring for their children, family, or the community,” she says.

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Dr Evelyn Kwok led and curated the exhibition, “Women at the End of the World”, which takes place parallel to Art Basel Hong Kong.

 

To convey the interrelated ideas of climate action and gender equality, Dr Kwok brought together four outstanding female artists, who are alumnae of AVA, and their meaningful responses to discourse on caring for the environment and the community.

She says: “Our exhibition explores how we can care for something bigger than ourselves. It invites the audience to ponder what matters to them when the world ends: it can be caring for the environment, our relationships with others, and society.”

The exhibition showcases the creative endeavors of Ms Ice Wong, Ms Michelle Fung, Ms Stacey Chan and Ms Mandy Ma. Their works encompass different visual art mediums ranging from wood block prints to recycled textiles and interactive installations.

In a living plant installation piece, The interweaving of You and I – Sowing, Ms Ice Wong explores the interconnectedness and inter-influence of nature and humanity. Featuring the sunflower for its symbolic meaning of hope and healing and its actual scientific value, her art piece invites the audience to take a seed home and plant it. Ice hopes that the process of growing a plant can bring therapeutic benefits to the planters and highlight the interdependent relationship between human and plants.

Ms Michelle Fung creates the fictional country Northlandia in her lifelong art project, The World of 2084, which portrays a futurist world in 2084. Her residency at The Arctic Circle, an expeditionary residency programme in arctic Svalbard, has inspired her works Northlandia, a collection of 24 woodcuts, and Giant Puffins on Mountain Top, a woodcut carving work.

“My project The World of 2084 began when I was studying the Master of Arts in Visual Arts programme at HKBU. Northlandia is one of the five imaginary countries I’ve created in the project, and it is impacted by climate change and warming in a myriad of ways. This woodcut collection tells the surrealistic tale of Northlandia and expresses my views on the issues related to climate change,” says Michelle.

Ms Stacey Chan’s practice often uses everyday objects, particularly pharmaceuticals, as the medium. In Redemption II, she casted powdered painkiller pills into heads of Buddha in bottles to ask whether religion and art have become commodities in the context of modern commercial marketing. “People seem to perceive that pharmaceuticals must be round or oval-shaped, and they can certainly treat diseases. I wanted to redefine what pharmaceuticals mean by breaking down medicines into powder and adding a religious dimension to the work,” says Stacey.

The mixed media piece Placebo II features rows of powdered pills in the form of miniature palms. “The palms look like the Buddha’s mudra, a patient’s hand receiving pills or the hand of a person asking for help. This work allows viewers to associate the ‘hand’ motif with different meanings and evaluate the relationship between the saviour and the saved in the worlds of art, religion and medicine,” she says.

Specialising in knitting, Ms Mandy Ma created the interactive installations In the Presence of You and In the Presence of You II using the wool collected from the clothes of children as well as her family and friends. “Nowadays most of our knitwear is manufactured by machines. I took apart the collected wool fabrics and knitted them by hand to create these soft installations, replacing what was machine-made with the human touch,” she says.

Mandy hopes that visitors can enjoy a collective experience of warmth and connections through up-close participation of her works. “The installations create a variable space which people can explore in and change, so the viewers become participants as well as the designers of the work,” she says.

To find out more about the exhibition, please visit the exhibition website.