ARTOMITY 藝源

How to draw a line across the sea? /
Peng Chau Cinema /
Hong Kong /
Nov 15 – Dec 21, 2025 /

Yip Kai Chun’s solo exhibition occupies the lobby and former ticket office of the old Peng Chau Cinema, which has recently reopened to host art events. The building’s architecture is typical of the 1970s, featuring a concrete floor, broad columns and walls covered with small blue tiles reminiscent of swimming pool mosaics. The space is filled with natural light and has been thoughtfully used by Clarissa Lim, the curator, who has skilfully created a setting that resonates with Yip’s reflections on island life and his long-term experience as a resident of Peng Chau, where he has lived for the past eight years.

In this new series of works, Yip invites us to share his insular gaze and to consider the surrounding landscape from his vantage point, one shaped by observing his environment from the ferry he takes every day, a routine that has profoundly influenced and transformed his relationship with geography.

Scroll: Kowloon on the Right (2025), for instance, is an immense horizontal composition made up of overlapping photographs and videos. Placed end to end, these elements form a long horizon, visible upon entering the hall. The images retrace the artist’s sea journeys from Hong Kong Island to Peng Chau but they also unfold as a voyage through time: Yip incorporates archival material, juxtaposing past and present views. Like fissures in time and space, these historical fragments rupture the linear continuity and visual uniformity of the scroll. Among them is a striking image of the egrets that once settled on the West Kowloon reclamation site, during the construction of the M+ Museum. Along the way, sound recordings feature testimonies from Peng Chau residents, who share personal memories.

For Yip, each ferry ride plays out like a film, a sensation he translates through the form of a continuous scroll reminiscent of classical Chinese painting. Yet his seascape is far from regular or linear. Like an old film reel, it stutters and jumps, foregrounding the spatial and temporal discontinuities of a landscape shaped by subjective memory and collective imagination. These ruptures can be read as absences or, conversely, as spaces of freedom. And then, of course, there is the rolling motion of the waves, regularly lifting the horizon and continuously shifting the contours of a landscape as seen from a boat. Living on an island, the artist notes, means inhabiting the tension between isolation and continuity: the sea functions both as mediator – linking the islands into a single, connected space – and as the agent of their separation.

Scroll: The Milky Way (2025), installed in the former ticketing room, offers another panoramic vision of Peng Chau. This time, the work takes the form of a long, pixelated, black-and-white video in which the island’s contours appear like constellations of lights. Islanders, Yip explains, refer to these bright points as “stars”, familiar visual markers by which they orient themselves in darkness. These floating references recall the experiential way sailors navigate: guided not by maps but by sensory awareness and embodied knowledge. For an outsider, the work unfolds like a poetic tableau in which each light seems to signal to us, as if calling from afar. One might recall Kingsley Ng’s video installation Solitary Light (2011), which presented a panoramic view of Hong Kong at night, its city lights shimmering against drifting swarms of fireflies. Which lights should one follow in the darkness? How does one find orientation in a black night? Once again, Yip underscores how our relationship to landscape is woven from stories and personal landmarks – empirical knowledge that situates the body at the centre of our engagement with place. Seen from the boat, the world becomes dynamic and uncertain, inviting the viewer to embrace movement, discontinuity and subjective vision.

View of the ferry from Western Street and from Western Street of the ferry. Impressions for Couplet: Perfect Alignment, an Instance by Yip Kai Chun. Photo: Yip Kai Chun.

The installation Couplet: Perfect Alignment, an Instance (2025) extends this theme of connection and recognition. Two vertical video screens face each other across the gallery, forming a visual dialogue. During his daily crossings to Hong Kong Island, Yip noticed a unique perpendicular street, Sai Ying Pun’s Western Street, from which he could glimpse a mountain framed between urban buildings. He imagined someone standing above, waving to him from that fleeting line of sight. The first video is filmed from that viewpoint. A ferry slides discreetly into view, placing the spectator in the imagined position of this distant observer, whose gaze suddenly meets the sea. From Eastern Street, in the second video, the view is blocked by new construction. Hong Kong, once deeply rooted in its maritime culture, appears increasingly enclosed, turning its back on the sea that shaped it.

With Map: See You on the Flip Side (2025), Yip proposes an even more radical shift in perspective: seeing the world through the eyes of a Chinese white dolphin. The work was originally created for the 2025 exhibition Think Outside the Box at Lingnan University’s Leung Fong Oi Wan Art Gallery, curated by Duncan Yiu, which brought together artists and scientists in conversation. For this project, Yip collaborated with marine researcher Dr Scott Chui from the Science Unit of Lingnan University, who studies how infrastructure affects the habitat and behaviour of Chinese white dolphins in the Pearl River estuary. The artist’s map reveals the vast, borderless expanse through which dolphins travel, inviting viewers to explore their world and habits by flipping cards and charts. Yip translates aspects of the scientist’s method while taking on the challenge of conveying the dolphin’s unique relationship to space and territory.

The task is challenging, and many contemporary artists are experimenting with various media, often based on technologies such as virtual reality, to offer glimpses of non-human perception, for example seeing like a bat in Zheng Mahler’s What Is It Like to Be a Virtual Bat? (2022). How can we embody multidimensional, interwoven, dynamic conceptions of time and space that are foreign to our human categories of thought? In Yip’s work, the visual and textual language remains close to academic modes of representation, creating a certain distance between the audience and the subject, and keeping the work within a reflective sphere, almost abstract. One might have wished for another type of engagement that is, if not physical, then at least affective, to help viewers connect more easily with this alien, fish-like world vision. Still, the project has the merit of prompting us to rethink anthropocentric mapping conventions and to consider new ways of including living beings within our representations of the world.

Ultimately, Yip’s exhibition urges us to move beyond static, GPS-based modes of representation and to embrace instead forms that are mobile, embodied, decentred and subjective. At stake is the enrichment and broadening of our conception of space and territory, by rendering back its thickness and complexity. As anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us in The Perception of the Environment (2000), “Places do not have locations but histories. Bound together by the itineraries of their inhabitants, places exist not in space but as nodes in a matrix of movement” – to which we must include the world of non-humans with whom we share our environment. 

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葉啟俊 
「浮線日誌」
坪洲戲院
香港
2025年11月15日至12月21日

葉啟俊的個展選址於舊坪洲戲院的大堂及昔日的票房，這座建築近期已重新開放，用以舉辦藝術活動。其1970年代的建築特徵被完整保留：石屎地坪、粗闊立柱、以及鋪滿細小藍色瓷磚的牆面，令人想到泳池馬賽克的拼貼質感。展廳內自然光線充盈，策展人林凱琍巧妙運用這一特質，構建出一個與藝術家共鳴的場域，承載著他對離島生活的思考，也凝結了其作為坪洲居民長達八年的生活體驗。

是次系列新作中，葉氏邀請觀者共享其離島凝視，從其視角審視周遭的地貌。藝術家的視角由其每日乘搭渡輪所塑，這一日常習慣已深刻影響並重塑了他與地理空間的關係。

以「Scroll: Kowloon on the Right」（2025年）為例，此巨幅橫向作品由層疊的照片與錄像構成。這些素材首尾相連，在觀者步入展廳之際便鋪展為一道綿長的地平線。畫面追溯了藝術家從香港島至坪洲的海上旅程，同時也展開為一場穿越時間的航行：葉氏將檔案資料融入其中，讓過往與當下的景觀並置。這些歷史片段猶如時空裂隙，打破了捲軸線性的連貫性與視覺的整體性。其中一張攝於M +博物館興建期間、棲息在西九填海工地上的白鷺照片極為引人注目。沿途的錄音則收錄了坪洲居民口述，分享著他們的個人記憶。

對葉氏而言，每次渡輪航程都如一部影片，他將這種感知轉化為連續的捲軸形式，類似中國的傳統繪畫。然而他展現的海景遠非規整或線性。如同老式電影膠片般，畫面時而卡頓、跳躍，突顯出被主觀記憶與集體想象所塑造的景觀中所存在的時空斷裂。這些斷裂既可被解讀為某種缺失，亦可視作自由空間。而海浪持續的起伏律動，則規律地托舉著地平線，不斷推移從船上所見的海岸輪廓。藝術家指出，住在離島即意味著棲居在隔絕與延續的張力之間：海水既是中介者，將諸島聯結成相連的整體；亦是致使它們分離的施動者。

「捲軸：銀河」（2025年）裝置於昔日票房，展現出坪洲的另一重全景圖像。作品以長幅、像素化的黑白錄像呈現，島嶼輪廓在其中如星群般浮現。葉氏解釋道，島上居民將這些光點稱為 「星星」，是黑暗中用以辨識方向的熟悉視標。這些漂浮的參照物讓人想到水手依靠經驗的導航方式：指引他們的並非地圖，而是感官覺察與具身經驗。對於外來者而言，作品如同一幅徐徐展開的詩意畫面，每一束光都似在發來遠處的呼喚。觀者或會想起伍韶勁（Kingsley Ng）的影像裝置「Solitary Light」（2011年），其中香港的夜間全景，城市燈火與飛舞的螢火蟲交相輝映。在黑暗中，該追隨哪一束光？在黑夜裡，又該如何尋找方向？葉氏再次強調，我們與地貌的關係是由故事與個人地標交織而成的——那是一種將自身置於空間體驗核心的經驗知識。從船上眺望，世界變得動態而不確定，它邀請觀者去接納此種變動、斷裂與主觀的視野。

裝置作品「對聯：合相一𣊬」（2025年）延續了關於連結與辨識的主題。兩幅垂直的錄像屏幕在展廳中相對而立，形成視覺對話。葉氏在日常往返港島的航程中，注意到一條獨特的垂直街道——西營盤的西邊街，從那裡他能望見框在城市樓宇間的一線山景。他想象有人或許正立於高處，從那轉瞬即逝的視線縫隙間向他揮手。第一段錄像便拍攝自這一視角：一艘渡輪悄然滑入視野，將觀者置於那位遙遠觀察者的想像位置，其目光在此刻驟然與大海相遇。而在第二段錄像中，從東邊街望去，視線已被新建樓宇阻擋。曾深深根植於海洋文化的香港，如今顯得日益封閉，正背棄塑造了它的那片海。

在「地圖：此處不留豚」（2025年）中，葉氏提出了一個更為徹底的視角轉換：以中華白海豚之眼看世界。作品最初為嶺南大學梁方靄雲藝術廊2025年的展覽「Think Outside the Box」而創作，由策展人Duncan Yiu邀集藝術家與科學家對話促成。葉氏與嶺南大學科學教研部的海洋研究員崔驛選博士合作，後者研究珠江口基建隊中華白海豚的棲息地與行為模式的影響。藝術家繪制的地圖呈現了海豚游經的廣闊無邊水域，邀請觀者通過翻轉卡片與圖表，探索它們的世界與習性。葉氏在將科學家的研究方法轉化為藝術創作，同時亦接受挑戰，試圖傳達海豚與空間和疆域間獨特的關係。

這項任務充滿挑戰，許多當代藝術家正嘗試運用各種媒介，通常借助虛擬現實等技術，呈現非人類的感知片段。例如鄭馬樂「作為一隻（虛擬）蝙蝠是怎麼樣的？」（2022年）中模擬的蝙蝠視角。我們該如何具象化那些多維交織、動態且與人類思維範疇截然不同的時空概念？在葉氏的作品中，視覺與文本語言仍貼近學術化表述，在觀者與主題之間構築了某種距離感，使作品始終處於近乎抽象的思辨層面。或許有人期待另一種介入形式——即便不是物理層面的，至少也是情感可觸的——以幫助觀者更輕易進入這種異類的近魚類視覺世界。然而此項目仍有可貴之處：它促使我們反思以人類為中心的地圖繪制慣例，並探索將其他生命體納入世界表徵的新途徑。

歸根結底，葉氏的展覽敦促我們超越靜態的、基於全球定位系統的表徵模式，轉而接納流動、具身、去中心化且主觀的形態。其核心在於通過還原空間與疆域的厚度與複雜性，來豐富並拓展我們對兩者的構想。正如人類學家蒂姆・英戈爾德在「環境的感知」（2000年）中所提醒：「地方並無坐標，只有層疊的歷史。它們借由棲居者的行跡彼此聯結，並非存在於空間之內，而是作為運動網絡中的節點而生成」——而我們須在此網絡中，納入與我們共享環境的非人類世界。