City Re-Stitched

An exhibition in which cinema intertwines with architecture.

Architecture has always been an omnipresence in cinema, whether it be a background setting that pertains to world-building, or a cinematographic plot device that frames a certain shot. Yet, architecture itself often blends into cinematic production, as a component that facilitates storytelling—a cog in the system of gears that composes a movie and feeds it to the consumer. City Re-Stitched is an exhibition that endeavours to stitch together selected pieces of Hong Kong architecture that have been featured in Hong Kong cinema, and in that, explores how cinema mediates architecture, and vice versa, in a local cultural context.

The content of the exhibition consists primarily of two videos produced by two artists, each juxtaposing different iconic scenes in Hong Kong movies with locations in reality, showing how familiar locations in Hong Kong are reconstructed and reiterated in cinema, and the dynamic relationship between the two media. To fully utilise the exhibition space, pieces of fabric are hung down from the ceiling, on which the videos are projected. The pieces of white cloth layered in front of each other mimic the layering techniques employed in architecture and cinema respectively, to enrich the texture of the product. Viewers can walk between the screens as they experience the exhibition, as if they were walking amidst some kind of manifestation of film and architecture. The screens themselves then become the centrepiece of the exhibition, together with the footage. Mirrors are installed at both ends of the exhibition space to expand the viewer’s spatial perception, enhancing the experience even more.

The visual identity for the exhibition also takes its cue from the idea of stitching together scenes and locations in cinema, and communicates it with a calculated chaos of orange fragments roughly resembling shapes of architecture scattered through the visuals. The exhibition invites the viewer to then re-stitch his/her own reading of the city and its relation with the creative media he/she consumes.

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