Visual Arts

Inhale…
With every inhale and exhale we are in an expanding and contracting relationship with our planet. This exhibition is about humans, trees, and the breath that connects us.
With restrictions around our daily movement and social interaction over the last year and a half, locally, a vital consolation was our ability to venture into Hong Kong’s country parks and nature reserves.
Trees, earth, blue sky and space serve as short escapes from the stress of the city. Hong Kong’s outdoor spaces and hiking trails became a form of mass therapy that helped to keep our mental health balanced during a time of heightened anxiety, uncertainty and claustrophobia.
While concern around air quality isn’t new, our relationship to air dramatically changed. Virtually overnight, the air we breathed became a collective life-threat, something to be feared. Air was something we could no longer share. Space was something we could not, without careful consideration, cohabit. If we lived with loved ones, simply returning home meant potential transmission. To have proximity we needed a physical barrier, having intimacy was a risky proposition.
With this, access to ‘good’ air and protection from ‘bad’ air were magnified. Oxygen tanks and protective masks were being shipped around the world to the highest bidder while some cities and countries desperately in need were running out. We were suddenly forced to confront the value attached to this given resource, oxygen, that we had taken for granted and the tensions of politics and cost associated with it.
Even more disheartening, was witnessing video and images of air directly and indirectly seized – from slash and burn forest fires in the Amazon, to the police violence that brazenly took the life of George Floyd and reawakened a global movement.
The quality of the air, the way we breathe, and who can and cannot breathe have all became prescient questions in 2020.
This exhibition raises and explores the topic and through the work of 11 artists/collectives contemplates the human relationship to what we consider “our natural environment”.