MINI Museum Updates: Wong Ka Wing

Remember the MINI Museum? It was spotted for the last time in Hong Kong in January, when Norwegian artist Susi Law used it during a solo show, and then disappeared. It resurfaced recently in the frame of the group show “Excuse me, where is the market?“, curated by Reds Cheung King-wai at Red Elation Gallery, Hong Kong (August 24 – September 21, 2013). Chinese artist Wong Ka Wing used it to show his work Preserve.Image (2013), which was added to the Museum collection.

 

 

Opening streets to vehicular traffic and offering money to street vendors to surrender their stall licenses, Hong Kong is trying to remove the few remaining street markets. Red Elation Gallery invited five young, local artists to express their ideas on the local market. Intending to maintain the disappearing “market”, Wong Ka Wing took a series of abstracted photographs to reveal unseen values of the local market. According to John Batten, “Wong shoots the names of businesses operating in Graham Street market without a lens. The resulting images merely show graduations in colour, with the names having disappeared, which will soon be the fate of these businesses, too.” The photos were shown in printed form and as a slideshow on the MINI Museum.

 

 

Wong Ka Wing (born in Hong Kong in 1987) had his childhood in Guangzhou. He received his BA Visual Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. Relations between people and social phenomenon are what his works are concerned about. Performance, conceptual work and photography are the media he uses.

 

 

The MINI Museum has been passed on, and will resurface at some point in mainland China.