The Art Promotion Office is excited to launch the fourth #ArtTravellers Exhibition Series at the Trade and Industry Tower featuring two young local artists, Samson Cheung and Frank Tang, who have drawn inspiration from a trip they made to Kyotango in Japan. Reimaging, rethinking and reconstructing their experiences and impressions of a foreign land, they string their insights together in unique artistic idioms to present an exciting, relivable art journey.

Cheung and Tang both visited Kyotango for an artist-in-residence programme in 2016. Reuniting for this exhibition on the theme of travel, the two artists recreate highlights of their stay in Japan through the ingenious use of space in the foyer of the Trade and Industry Tower. The multimedia displays are built along three lines drawn from their impressions of Kyotango: the sea, a lighthouse and a map.Cheung and Tang draw on each other’s experiences and creations to relate their complex feelings about travelling. Commuters are now invited to take a break from their hurried journey and pause a while to appreciate, feel and reflect on various aspects of travel by opening their eyes, ears and minds to the exhibits. These works are not only the product of two artists putting their ideas together, but an invitation to viewers to start a dialogue about the culture of travel and to explore the deeper meanings of a journey.

The exhibition features Hanison Lau and Chan Dick, two creative artists working in two different media, and follows their soulful explorations and adventures in which they look at unknown histories and cultures, or revisit snippets that are lost in memory.

Artist Hanison Lau attempts to look for the familiarity in the old items when he is on a strange land. His all-time favourite haunting ground is the flea market. He uses old furniture items in an installation to simulate the display of an antiques market. Tableaux or stories in his work would evoke memories in many of us. Modular sculptures and antiques from overseas are placed side by side to spark imagination and stir up memories. Together, they make flashes of stories of the nebulous bygones. In doing so, he gives a new twist to old things and the things that happened during his journeys.

Childhood memories are photographer Chan Dick’s key to this wondrous realm. He displays a photo series taken in a deserted amusement park in central Taiwan to reminisce about his childhood at the Kai Tak Amusement Park in San Po Kong, Kowloon. Photos of the defunct amusement park document Chan’s immediate moods and perspectives: the focus on the ferris wheel and merry-go-round alternates between memory and reality, creating a journey in the perspective of interwoven joy and forlornness, and bringing visitors of the exhibition back to a space lost in time.

Featuring two local artists, Carol Lee Mei-kuen and Trevor Yeung, the exhibition shows their unique travelogue of gleanings. Working in different media, Lee and Yeung both take inspiration from a wide variety of exotic plant gathered during their travels and re-express them in personalised artistic forms. Involving botanic observations and discoveries of natural origins, the transformation process creates new artistic idioms and opens up a universal panorama.

Carol Lee Mei-kuen likes to visit historical destinations where she can trace the provenance of culture and observe the natural sequence of events. Picking wild plants along the way, she presses them to retain their shapes in a ‘frozen’ frame of time. When put together, the seemingly insignificant elements form an emblem of foreign lands.

Trevor Yeung, in contrast, gathers different plant species from around the world. Through horticulture and installations, he juxtaposes the relationship between natural landscapes and cultural ecology, while slowly exposing the growth patterns of the plants under photosynthesis. The geographical differences between various species are thus blurred, giving rise to an unusual bonsai art that resembles a miniature urban greenhouse.

In this exhibition, Eastman Cheng has re-constructed foreign signs and reassembled them into landscape furniture – soft sculptures made of various fabrics and soft materials, stitched and embroidered with textures from exotic lands. The three sets of landscape furniture, which appear to be a balcony, a dining table and a floor lamp, are actually scenic microcosms of China, Europe and Africa, expressing the artist’s feelings and her experience of different countries. Ivy Ma took snapshots of historical signs that were difficult to spot during recent trips and has created a novel landscape through magnifying, segmenting and assembling them. She applied geometric and linear patterns with gold leaf and cement to her images, blurring the lines between reality and imagination, and the distance between past and present. Four displayed works by Ivy fuse photography with painting, inviting viewers to critically review their assumed knowledge of exotic lands.