After Seventeen Days
057PMQ, Hong Kong
The government recently announced a campaign to beautify the cityscape that includes the repair or removal of at least 1,700 signboards. Signboards are rapidly vanishing from the streets of Hong Kong, due to a new regulation which considered most of the existing signboards as illegal structures. While a validation scheme is in place to assess individual signboards’ worthiness to remain on the streets, the scheme does not take into account the signboards’ historic, cultural and aesthetic values.
The After Seventeen Days project proposes a signboard evaluation system similar to the evaluation of historic buildings, to determine which signboards should stay or go based on a set of criteria. A field of 17 signboards presently hung in the streets around Hong Kong will be enacted in a dark room. During the exhibition period, one signboard will be selected daily for the signboard evaluation system featuring a physical ‘keep or trash’ button on-site and an online questionnaire to record the visitors’ preferences.
Visitors will have their say to decide the fate of every signboard, and signboards destined to disappear will be veiled by a green net at the end of each day – symbolising the signboards’ impending departure. At the finale of deTour 2022, After Seventeen Days will visualise the public’s views on signboard culture and the subject’s perceived value to our city.
Context:
deTour Design Festival in 2022 is curated with the motif “Design as One”, and the project responses to the curatorial concept by creating a voting system for the visitors and public to determine the destiny of these contemporary living relics in Hong Kong. Each of the seventeen days of the design festival, one sign presently living at the time of the project will be publicly voted with background informations of the signboards and questions raised to stimulate public’s decision making and judgement on their choices.
Concept:
Signboards living in the city are replicated and oriented to face internally, almost as an alleyway or small cracks within a megalithic environment. Visitors can only perceive the actual image of the signboards when they decide to enter the tunnel. Bamboo scaffolding engulfs and suspends the signages begin as a ghosted framework. When any of the signages gathered more votes to be ‘Trashed’, the respective green construction net will be veiled downward to cover the signage and the corresponding segments to signify the death of the signage.
Process:
The project was later relocated into two linked rooms for better lighting environment of the neon signs, leading to the idea of an ellipse pathway puncturing a journey across the corridor into both rooms and return to the starting point. Exterior half of the ellipse is where one exert their votes and powers, while the interior half receives the influences impacted by the decisions made by the visitors when the button is triggered.
Production:
The project is assembled by different local craftsmanship or identities from mainly neon sign making, word etching, bamboo scaffolding, green construction nets, plastic laminated paper sheets… These together create a temporal work who question the visitors on their judgement on weighing the values of Hong Kong’s signboards. Does history and preservation turns anything or everything invulnerable?
Experience:
Videography from the deTour 2022 “Design as One” capturing the internal environment of the installation, where neon signs at the time when the project was designed enlighten the dark spaces with their typography and visual identities.
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Client:
PMQ, CreateHK
Occasion:
deTour Design Festival 2022
Typology:
Participatory, Installation, Exhibition
Status:
Completion
Location:
PMQ, Hong Kong
Duration:
2022
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Project Team:
Anthony Ko
Collaborators:
@streetsignhk
Fabrication and Construction:
Chit Shing Scaffolding (Bamboo Scaffolding)
Neon Tube Production (Wu Chi Kai)
Neon Electrician (Po Wah Neon Light)
China Bright Production (Acrylic Printing)
Anthony Ko & @streetsignhk (Exhibition Set-Up)
Sponsors:
Chit Shing Scaffolding
John Kung Sun Chiu
Photo Courtesy:
@streetsignhk
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