love street
by jebni on June 9, 2006
The other day our minds were completely blown when we saw the Love Street exhibition at the UMA Gallery in Wan Chai. A response to the redevelopment of Lee Tung Street in Wan Chai by Hong Kong’s “Urban Renewal Authority”, the exhibition involved residents’ action groups and artists, celebrating the everyday feelings of the space, and acting as a memorial for the disappearing richness of the area.
One of the artist-activists, Patrick Tse, gave us an impromptu tour of Wan Chai, pointing out points of contention and resistance hidden in the urban landscape around us. He then showed us a crazy canvas photomural of Lee Tung St that he’d worked on, which perfectly mapped both the extensive horizontality and verticality of the street onto its surface — it was stitched together in Photoshop out of over 150 separate photos, taken over several months by photographers mounted on a cherry picker.
The booklet produced by the Community Museum Project was also staggering, reproducing the mural in a huge fold-out format, and also lovingly documenting such ephemera as street signs, graffiti on doors, and the fucking antique light-switches of the area.
Without pretension or over-intellectualisation, Patrick said that their mission was “to amplify daily life”.
Here’s the photoset.
[ tags: everyday-life, hong-kong, psychogeography, urbanism ]