Glow Like That

“Glow Like That” is the first contemporary art exhibition held by K11 Art Foundation on the 21st floor of Victoria Dockside, an office tower in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. The show features 16 artists and collectives from countries including China, United States and Japan, showcasing an array of paintings, video works, sculptures, and installations. While some of the works demonstrate various forms of “glow” of our light-saturated era, others reveal their “radiating” functions and symbolic significances in contemporary society.

The Curatorial statement indicates: “Light is not only a natural phenomenon but also a product of technological advance. It is an empty signifier awaiting a narrative; it is undefined, fuzzy at the edges. Fluid and amorphous, light therefore has endless possibilities. When interacting with light, certain kinds of surfaces take on an iridescent sheen or reflect their surroundings, producing a shimmering or radiant “glow”.

The exhibition venue is a generic office floor with a mechanical false ceiling, raised aluminium clad flooring, ceiling to floor height glass façade.

The space presents itself with reversible lighting quality throughout the day - flooded with natural light from the exterior in the day time and emits light to the exterior at night.

Contrary to the majority of art exhibition spaces, this venue is extremely extroverted, wrapped with a fully glazed façade looking onto one of the most spectacular views of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour.

The design of the exhibition is a conceptual hybrid of the curatorial intention and the context – we abstracted the generic office space into a glowing vacuum, amplifying the idea of radiance through materiality.

We cladded the full internal vertical surfaces of the office floor ( the core of the office tower) with the same muted reflective material of the existing raised aluminium clad flooring - similar to the idea of the white box, where all possible exhibition surfaces are abstracted to the like of its surrounding.

The glazed transparent façade is kept open – during the day, the muted metal cladding surfaces catches light from the exterior which absorb and reflect the “glow” from the exhibits in space, their coloured shadows juxtapose with the physical work in space; at night, the façade catches the “glow” of the art works, overlapping with the context of Hong Kong.

The design juxtaposes the glow of each individual work, the reverberated radiance of the space, and the illumination of the city, creating a very dynamic exhibition experience.

Artists: Advisory Board Crystals, Kelly Akashi, Larry Bell, Chen Wei, Chen Zhou, Tishan Hsu, Donna Huanca, Liang Yuanwei, Mountain River Jump!, Raúl De Nieves, DeWain Valentine, Alice Wang, Lantian Xie, Tsuruko Yamazaki, Yu Honglei, and Zhang Ruyi.