Gallery Visit: Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs with Curator Michelle Wong
The Executive Committee is pleased to organise a visit to Para Site for a guided tour with the Curator, Michelle Wong, of ‘Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs’, an exhibition that refocuses on Ha’s printmaking practice on the occasion of Ha’s 100th birth anniversary.
‘Motherboard’ is the term Hong Kong-based artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009) coined for his collagraph plates. Unlike computer motherboards, Ha’s creations are decidedly analogue. They are assembled from wood and other found material through a highly labour-intensive process. Throughout his life, Ha created over 100 motherboards and kept them away from public view. He used these motherboards to produce over 3,000 editioned collagraphs mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.
About Ha Bik Chuen
Ha Bik Chuen (1925-2009) was a Hong Kong-based artist who made prints, sculptures, collage books, and was also a prolific photographer. He publicly showed prints and sculptures, but kept most of his photographs and all his collage books private. In the 1960s, Ha became an artist and an active participant of the Hong Kong art scene by documenting exhibitions and events through photography. His collection of visual materials forms a crucial part of Hong Kong’s cultural and art history. Ha’s archive has become one of the key resources of writing Hong Kong art history.
About Michelle Wun Ting Wong
Michelle Wun Ting Wong completed her PhD studies in Art History at The University of Hong Kong in 2024, exploring the modernity emerging from Post WWII Hong Kong. From 2012–20 she was a researcher at Asia Art Archive (AAA), focusing on Hong Kong art history and histories of exchange and circulation through exhibitions and periodicals. Her curatorial projects include ‘Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary (2021), ‘Afterglow’, Yokohama Triennale 2020, and 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016). Her writing has been published in Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945–1990 (2018), the journal Southeast of Now (2019) amongst others. Since 2022, she co-runs the independent art space New Park with artists South Ho Siu Nam and Billy HC Kwok. Wong’s PhD dissertation is an in-depth study of the work and life of Ha Bik Chuen and its relationship to the cultural modernity and artistic modernism emerging from mid-twentieth century Hong Kong. Before returning to graduate school at HKU, Wong was AAA’s lead researcher and part of an archivist team organising and digitising Ha’s archive, which has since become one of the key resources of writing Hong Kong art history.
Please visit https://www.para-site.art/exhibitions/reframing-strangeness-ha-bik-chuens-motherboards-and-collagraphs/ for more information on this exhibition.
Photo credit: Para Site