Hong Kong Contemporary Arts Awards entries make telling observations about the city

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Paddling Home,a floating Hong Kong apartment, by Kacey Wong. A film of the work is part of the Contemporary Art Awards. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 5:19pm, 22 Dec 2013

One way to view the ongoing Hong Kong Contemporary Arts Awards exhibition is to collect a headset at the entrance of the Hong Kong Museum of Art and listen to Cédric Maridet's "The Sound of Art" while walking around. More a series of field recordings inside galleries around the world than sound art, Maridet's piece has the uncanny ability of focusing the show and blocking out all extraneous sound.

Through Maridet's recordings, the museum's ambience is distorted, replaced by our own thoughts on the art.

The work of Kacey Wong Kwok-choi dominates the entrance to the exhibition, including Paddling Home, a mini reproduction of a floatable Hong Kong-style apartment created for a performance at the 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Architecture Biennale. The showing of the documentary video of the performance could have been improved if accompanied by more information about Wong's social criticism as art, a significant facet of his recent work.

Despite its title, Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, Ip Yuk-yiu's tableaux of excerpts from the videogame Call of Duty: Black Ops, is a beguiling view of Hong Kong. On a rain-sodden day, the unusually empty streets are glimpsed through lightning flashes. Ip successfully reworks the original video's story to distort the action-film stereotype of Hong Kong into the familiar Kowloon streets known to residents.

The understated video is a surprisingly strong call to keep this city's unique street ambience over the interests of rapacious redevelopment.

Likewise, the photography of So Hing-keung and Max Chan Wang has a political undercurrent in their presentation. So's intentionally scratched and degraded images of familiar mainland sites, such as Beijing's "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium and the Temple of Heaven, question the touted success of the mainland's recent economic and geo-political resurgence. Chan's manipulated images of Hong Kong housing estate blocks depict scenes that are impossibly serene and photo-picturesque.