Digit@logue
Hong Kong Museum of Art
Curated by Ellen Pau, a fixture on the new media scene, this show sets out to explore the dialogue between technology, culture and art. It's an ambitious undertaking and perhaps a good starting point for those unfamiliar with artistic applications of electronic media. But it makes for a sprawling exhibition somewhat lacking in thematic cohesion.
So we have diagnostic radiologist Fung Kai-hung's luridly coloured computed tomography images of the human body jostling with a minimalist conceptual work by Ho Siu-kee, a seemingly endless video of a golden pin the length of his face being slowly hammered out on an anvil to reach his full body height.
Then there's Francis Lam's db-db loves you, which seems to be little more than a plug for his social networking website, a few steps from Henry Chu's topical Security Machines (right), which mimics the gaze of security cameras by screening digitised images of the viewer suggestive of facial-recognition surveillance technology, breaking down their individuality into streams of Matrix-style code.
There are other strong works including Qiu Anxiong's animation, The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Oceans, which, despite its blunt political allegory, is a nightmarish journey through a Hobbesian universe of perpetual conflict populated with animals and birds morphed into weapons of war.