The Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences Tomorrow-Jun 27
Charles LaBelle has degrees in film and art from the University of California at Los Angeles, and has worked in a variety of mediums such as film, video, photography, and installation and performance art. But since 2007, when he moved from the US to Hong Kong, the 46-year-old artist has focused his attention on a single project that he began 10 years ago - one he says will be finished only when he dies. Its end-products are pencil drawings of buildings, including the one where his works will go on exhibition tomorrow.
Conceived as both a personal diary and larger historical record, LaBelle's Buildings Entered project involves the documentation of every building he has physically entered since he began it.
'Basically, the project for me is the moment before I go into a new building, when I force myself to stop and go across the street and look at the building I'm about to enter. And it's that moment of contemplation, a moment of awareness of myself being in the world, in opposition to the structure ... that I am interested in,' he says.
'And at that moment, I write down the time and location of the building and all that information goes into what I call the archive.'
From the almost 12,000 entries in his Buildings Entered archive, LaBelle (right) selected over 200 to render into drawings for the show at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, with an eye on the location and the building's historical associations with the body. (The structure formerly was home to the Pathological Institute.)