“It’s an experience, and it’s an experiment,” curator Wong Wing Fung said.

Located at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei, the festival opened on February 17 and runs to the 26th, exploring human imagination through the theme “Mind’s Eye”. Visitors need to construct an image in their minds to understand the pieces – many designed to be touched to be experienced – using shape and texture rather than colour, lines, composition and space, according to Fung.

“It’s a new way of seeing every kind of artwork,” artist Brandon Chan Pak-kin said.

The concept of the festival is to create an experience inclusive of individuals who are blind or visually impaired.

“Touch art is an inclusive art,” Fung and others wrote in an essay last year, published by the Arts Development Council. “We encourage inclusion: this means that we would not look at what others ‘cannot do’. We want to appreciate what they ‘can’.”

Many of the festival’s artworks were created by pairs of local artists and individuals who are visually impaired, including a joint piece by Chan and university student Ivan Tang – also a professional bowls player and part-time waiter.

Their piece is a black pinewood bench with heat-sensitive paint that can change colour. Resting a hand on the bench for a few seconds will temporarily leave a lightened handprint.

Chan said the piece reflected communication, something he learned while working with Tang, as the two have different lifestyles and experiences.

“Communication between two people is something like this – you have to spend time,” Chan said as he leaned back against the bench, which lightened in response to his body heat. “I have to spend time on this seat to make this kind of mark. The process may take time, but the result is something you cannot express.”

“Art is very powerful,” said artist Ko Bin Lin, who created a piece of art out of plastic pipes, reminiscent of a children’s playground. “Touch [allows you] very directly to feel the material or [your] personal feelings.”

People who cannot see have a different experience of art, often interpreting objects in a distinct, out-of-the-box way, according to Fung.

As a complement to the festival, she recorded two people with visual impairments verbally describing the pieces after touching them, such as a woman perceiving a figure of a mountain as a human face.

“This [different perception] is very close to what I believe is art,” she said. “Art is for people who can get away from reality for a moment, to realise things they don’t [ordinarily].”