Visual Arts

In Hong Kong, roof shanties on high rise buildings have become an alternative typology of our hyperdense building culture. They form a particular urban fabric interweaving multiple levels and distances. Here the artist, Frank Havermans, together with local metalsmiths, arrives Wan Chai Visual Archive and reconceptualizes a mutation of roof shanty – with its domestic function and enclosure being removed – on the rooftop of a typical Tong-Lau in Hong Kong.
Now brought to life, the roof art installation reveals, rotates, and retracts from time to time. Inherited with a gene of vernacular architecture, this creature lives in between regulation and reason, action and affection, position and boundary. It has learnt to improvise the city, in order to survive….