A Tour of Detour

From November 26 to December 12, Victoria Prison on Old Bailey Street in Central will transform into a massive installation as the highlight of this year’s Detour, a design event established in 2006 to showcase designs from Hong Kong’s emerging creative talents and promote Hong Kong as a regional creative hub. For two weeks, a variety of design exhibitions, performances and creative exchanges will take place at the historical site of Hong Kong’s first prison.

Initially founded as a fringe program that the Hong Kong Design Center organized along with Business of Design Week (BoDW), Detour switched to a more approachable model in 2008 after the Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design attained ownership of the event. Last year, it was held to great success at the Former Police Married Quarters on Hollywood Road—conservative estimates put the number of visitors at 12,000.

“It’s almost a street version of BoDW” Alan Lo, chairman of the Ambassadors, says about this year’s program. “There’s a special pop-up nature to it. We tested the waters last year with a spectrum of events, from concerts to films. This time we’re focusing more on the quality rather than quantity of the programs. And we’re definitely looking to beat last year’s number of visitors.”

The core installation of Detour 2010, titled “Soft Spot,” is created by the artist-architect team of Thomas Tsang with ffixxed [sic] and Naia del Castillo, which was commissioned by China Becomings, a showcase of young designers and architects in the Greater China area. It features 600 elastic strings (a total length of 32 kilometers) spread across the prison courtyard, which completely redefines the venue. New York-based architect Thomas Tsang says the idea comes from the interesting phenomena of a prison economy. “In prison, people trade with items such as cigarettes. And the value of those items change all the time—it’s unfixed,” he explains. “So we used soft, elastic cords to represent this kind of flexible, soft economy, trying to create maximum effect with minimum means.” The installation will stay up for two weeks, then the cords will be given to the public. The team’s next project is to distribute the strings around Hong Kong and see what people do with them. “They’re quite beautiful. I guess you can use them as belts or shoelaces,” Tsang says. Another highlighted project is a collaboration between local and Japanese designers as the result of a new cultural design exchange program launched this year, DeX Detour. Working under the theme of “Not Guilty,” for one week, ten Hong Kong designers including Prudence Mak, Henry Chu and Michael Leung, travelled to Tokyo to meet their Japanese counterparts and tour around the city for inspiration.

The ten Japanese designers then came over to Hong Kong to complete their collaborations. And through their works, each participant delves into the large, broad topic and displays their own understandings of the issue. Prudence Mak from Chocolate Rain Design borrows her father’s personal experience as a former Chinese-English prison interpreter in the 1970s and creates an installation—“I made four, five layers of curtain along the prison hallway, and as you walk through them one by one, you’ll finally reach a figure, which will be the secret weapon of my creation,” she says. Alan Lo says the topic, “Not Guilty,” is both a literal and abstract interpretation of the site itself, and it’s the first time for Detour to have such a direct concept as the site theme (the site, remember, is a former prison).