Marking Art Basel’s return to Hong Kong, M+ Museum to project Buddhist meditation video in sign language on its huge public art wall every day for a month
- The video by filmmaker Ellen Pau will show a futuristic being recite the Buddhist ‘Heart Sutra’ in sign language for two hours, visible from 7pm-9pm from May 20
- Pau, who hopes the film will bring healing to those who see it and encourage them to ‘keep calm and carry on’, reveals how a friend’s passing inspired the work
To mark the return of the Art Basel fair in Hong Kong, the giant external wall of M+ museum, in the West Kowloon Cultural District, will come to life from May 20 with a new video by filmmaker Ellen Pau.
While the position and size of the LED wall on the side of the museum makes this a piece of public art that harks back to the large, multimedia projections that Pau used to make for Hong Kong-based theatre group Zuni Icosahedron, the seed of The Shape of Light came from a private act of grieving.
In 2019, one of Pau’s closest friends and former Zuni collaborator Chan Pik-yu died from cancer. In her final days, Chan repeated Buddhist sutras to herself to get through the pain.
“I am not a Buddhist,” Pau says. “But for the closing of my solo exhibition at [contemporary arts centre] Para Site in 2019, I felt a desire to continue my connection with my friend and I arranged for a performance of the Heart Sutra expressed through signing. The new work is a continuation of that connection.”
The work will hopefully bring healing, she adds. “I am not suggesting we should escape from reality. But we all need to ‘keep calm and carry on’, as the old wartime slogan suggests.”