Project222_a hundred boxes of childhood wonders
Installation
for "Art><Creativity" Exhibition Series in Greater Bay Area, Childhood Fun on Paper Exhibition
Remember playing with your friends in your childhood days? Perhaps on a fine day, you would all throng to the park, scramble to line up for games, or play sports together. If it rained, you might move to a covered playground or pavilion to play board games, such as "Peace and Happiness Chess", taking turns to move the figurine chess pieces, hopping from box to box, all of you eager to move ahead on the paper chessboard. The exhibition, titled "Childhood Fun on Paper", features Sue Lai and the creative ensemble STICKYLINE, who revive the nostalgic boardgame "Peace and Happiness Chess" in their own creative ways. Visitors are invited to set aside their electronic games for a while to explore together the joy of childhood as they navigate the virtual world on paper.
Sue Lai excels in Chinese gongbi (fine brush) techniques to capture scenes of everyday life and portraits, and children are often her source of inspiration. In this exhibition, she applied her gongbi painting techniques to recreate a chessboard, on which children play various games. The artistic rendering has modern touches to illustrate the timelessness of innocence in young hearts, shown on their faces. Designers Mic Leong and Soilworm Lai of STICKYLINE pursue their long-standing passion for paper. Breaking the limitations of the two-dimensional frame, they created three-dimensional paper sculptures in human form to put on the huge three-dimensional chessboard. Whether they are child figures, playground facilities, or flowers at the edge, they are presented in a variety of proportions to help recall our collective childhood memories of playing in the park.
photo credit : APO
CHILDHOOD FUN ON PAPER
Exhibition
Date: 01 Jun - 23 Jul 2023
Venue: Gensquare, Jiangmen, 197 Hexing Square, Baishi Avenue, Jiangmen
Project Page: https://https://www.apo.hk/en/web/apo/childhood_fun_on_paper.html
The fourth exhibition "Childhood Fun on Paper" of the second round of the "Art><Creativity" Exhibition Series in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) is now open to the public until July 23 at Gensquare, Jiangmen. This exhibition features Hong Kong artist Sue Lai and creative ensemble STICKYLINE, who revive the nostalgic board game "Peace and Happiness Chess" in the ways of Chinese gongbi and three-dimensional paper sculptures respectively. Visitors are invited to set aside their electronic games for a while and explore together the joy of childhood by navigating the virtual world on paper.
The board game "Peace and Happiness Chess" was introduced in the 1950s and 60s, and remained very popular even in the 90s in Hong Kong. It is also one of the happy childhood memories of Hong Kong artist Sue Lai. She applied the gongbi painting techniques to recreate the chessboard. Making use of a children's playground as the setting, she depicted 36 children playing in different play facilities. The children in her artwork are wearing kindergarten uniforms of Hong Kong nowadays and are riding on rocking horses that had been very common in public housing estates in the 1980s and 90s. The artwork takes visitors down memory lane to recall and recreate their collective childhood memories on one hand while allowing them to learn about the traditional art of gongbi painting on the other hand.
The creative ensemble STICKYLINE formed by Hong Kong designers Mic Leong and Soilworm Lai continued their long-standing passion for paper and broke the limitations of the two-dimensional frame through their artwork "A Hundred Boxes of Childhood Wonders". They created various three-dimensional paper sculptures in human form and put them on a huge three-dimensional chessboard. Through their abstract geometric paper sculptures, the play facilities and figurine chess pieces are minimised or magnified, allowing visitors who are present in this imaginative space to search for their childhood memories of playing in the park.
The "Art><Creativity" Exhibition Series in the Greater Bay Area is presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, co-organised by the Art Promotion Office and the Hong Kong Designers Association, with Shenzhen Fringe Art Centre being the project partner. The second round of the exhibition series has featured three physical and online art exhibitions in three cities in the GBA namely Huizhou, Zhuhai and Zhongshan, showcasing artworks of different Hong Kong artists and designers or design groups. Following the fourth station in Jiangmen, the last exhibition will be held in Zhaoqing from August.
Please click the link below to join our 360-degree virtual tour of the exhibition anytime and anywhere:
https://sgallery.cn/artcreativity10/
https://www.apo.hk/en/web/apo/home.html
/ 2023
"Art><Creativity" Exhibition Series in Greater Bay Area, Childhood Fun on Paper Exhibition Jan 2023