Artist Carsten Nicolai to illuminate Hong Kong as part of Art Basel

NEXT WEEK A luminous event will take place on Hong Kong’s harbour. It’s not the usual 8pm Symphony of Lights – this new display will start at 8.30pm, will only be on for three nights and involves a single building: the International Commerce Centre (ICC) in Kowloon.

To refer to it merely as a show would be to misrepresent both its timing and purpose. The first night, May 15, marks the official opening of Art Basel Hong Kong, and the plan is that the ICC – the tallest building in Hong Kong – will become a 484-metre work of contemporary art.

The man behind it is Carsten Nicolai, a German visual artist, musician and record producer. As the work, titled a (alpha) pulse, begins throbbing across the facades of the ICC, an app will simultaneously provide an audio track responding to the illumination. For 50 minutes each night, anyone in the city with a smartphone will have the opportunity to hold a mood-altering artistic masterpiece in the palm of their hand. The idea of mass mood shift is key. In neuroscience, alpha waves are known to affect the brain in positive ways.

Last January, Nicolai came to Hong Kong on a location hunt to try to envisage something that would involve as many people as possible. “I thought, ‘What can you do on such a scale?’” he says, sipping rhubarb juice between frequent cigarettes in the garden of his Berlin studio. “I chose the alpha pulse because it’s the most relaxing. It’s a great frequency, it’s slow and it can stimulate better learning.” He smiles, unexpectedly, and adds, “That sounds a little bit spooky.”

Anyone who’s only seen various photos of Nicolai looking like a mix between Morrissey and a young Klaus Kinski, might be inclined to think he’s a little bit spooky, too. “I’m actually funny,” he protests, quietly. “Of course, I’m not a big joke teller but humour is very important.” And it’s true that he has the wry expression of a man on the verge of secret laughter, which befits someone who, in 2009, collaborated with the English composer Michael Nyman on an opera about a dead budgie. (While it wasn’t exactly Monty Python, the title of this opus, Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, also contained a pun on the American composer John Cage.)

Still, he’s fairly intense about what he does. You might expect his studio to hum with noise, but there is no music, and his mobile phone is set to vibrate. “I used to make my own ringtone, of course, but I haven’t had one for three years.” His studio walls are almost as bare as a monastic cell. It’s a mild shock, amid the duct tape, spark generators and computers, to discover a child’s stroller parked in a corner. (He has four children about whom he prefers not to speak. Later, when asked, he says the red thread on his wrist comes from a visit to Cambodia where one of them is living.)