Combining research and technology, Phoebe Hui creates installations, sculptural works, and prints that interrogate the relationship between language, art, and science. Hui is the winner of the fifth Audemars Piguet Commission in 2019, for which she created her large-scale installation The Moon is Leaving Us (2021).
Read MorePhoebe Hui's earlier works activate comics as both a language and an art form. In 2005, the artist challenged its conventional two-dimensional form with What I think comics is #04: Vaudevillian Park by transforming the rooms at Hong Kong's Para Site gallery into sets for comics. Walking through the exhibition space, the visitors became characters in Hui's narrative, rather than readers.
Phoebe Hui began to gain wider recognition for her sound installations with Translucent Noise (2008), a solo exhibition at Hong Kong Arts Centre that emerged from her Bloomberg Emerging Artist Residency. In silkscreen prints and the video installation, Drop (2005–6), the artist expands the role of the performer by asking musicians to play random annotations that were created by dropping a marker pen on a canvas. Another video work, Doublets, doublets, doublets (2008), disrupts the traditional perception of music, assigning a tone to each letter of the alphabet and programming a sound generator to play words provided by viewers.
The gestural aspects of sound generation are among the core concerns of Phoebe Hui's works. In Granular Graph (2009), she attached a pair of pendulums to the underside of a wooden platform. When the audience walked across it, their movement triggered the pendulums to create ripples in a trough of water beneath the platform. The work was inspired by the harmonograph, a 19th-century apparatus that creates geometric drawings from the movements of pendulums.
Although Hui's shift from her earlier comic works to later sound installations appear drastic at first, the artist stated in a 2011 interview with Asia Art Archive that she has 'always been interested in the relationship between art, technology, and language' that the two mediums share. Hui's interest in sound began at the City University of Hong Kong, where she took a course in digital editing and sound design, and developed throughout her postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and London's Central Saint Martins College of Art.
Phoebe Hui's ongoing fascination with sound has led her to consider the mechanisms of instruments. Graphite Piano (2013), for example, is a wooden structure that resembles a piano, with pencils placed above its 24 keys. When played, the pencil comes into contact with the key, highlighting the physical acts associated with the production of sound and language.
In Dance of the Little Dusters (2020), the artist configured electronic devices to play Swan Lake while small dusters were programmed to 'dance' along to the music—a reference to the special codes manufacturers hide within everyday devices.
In 2019, Phoebe Hui was selected as the first artist to present the Audemars Piguet Art Commission in Asia, working alongside curator Ying Kwok to realise her large-scale project, The Moon is Leaving Us (2021) at Tai Kwun JC Contemporary, Hong Kong. Inspired by the diverse representations of the moon across cultures, disciplines, and time, Hui's work combines scientific research with a lyrical sensibility that is characteristic of her practice.
Hui devised the title, The Moon is Leaving Us, upon learning that the moon moves away from the Earth at a rate of 3.78 centimetres per year. Her interviews and collaboration with scientists, astronauts, and engineers revealed surprising facts, including that the Earth's native satellite actually displays a spectrum of bright colours, contrary to the pale grey colour we are most familiar with.
The Moon is Leaving Us includes Selenite, a mechanical sculpture in the shape of a satellite dish that projects NASA's images of the moon onto 48 screens. Selenite is also accompanied by Selena, a drawbot that creates lunar drawings, who was developed specifically for the exhibition.
Phoebe Hui's works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions including X+Y: Duo Solo Exhibition of Phoebe Hui and Tung Wing Hong, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2016); Watermans International Festival of Digital Art, London (2012); and An Open Rule: Blink Space: Drifting Presence, Para Site, Hong Kong (2004).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
