Cosmic Cats: Kingsley Ng’s Mind-Bending New Exhibition at CHAT

The new show by multimedia artist Kinglsey Ng at the CHAT, the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile, is bound to leave every visitor moved – especially so if they have ever loved a pet. Called Listen to the Sound of the Earth Spinning, the exhibition opens with a series of furry balls hanging from a string, in different sizes and colours, arranged from paler to darker, like a new constellation made of love between humans and animals. 

“These are balls made from pet hairs,” explains Ng. “The idea came from our cat, named Whisky. We brush Whisky every single day, it is like a daily ritual, but I don’t like to throw away her shedding.” Which is how the idea of turning a beloved pet’s shedding into a furry mini-planet came about. For this exhibition, a call was sent out to other pet owners — CHAT is one of the most pet-friendly venues in Hong Kong — and more than 100 of them made a felted, furry ball of their animal’s shedding, which is kept in shape by a Styrofoam ball hidden inside. 

38.7 Hz by Kingsley Ng, ‘Listen to the Sound of the Earth Spinning’, CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong, 2024

Some of the balls are arranged to look even more like planets, mounted inside the kind of rounded metal holder that is usually employed for globes of the earth, or occasionally other planets, called a cradle mount; it can be made to spin with a finger. It’s an object that used to be very common in schools or as decoration for a studio, and which now looks pleasantly old fashioned, referencing a time when we looked at fewer digital maps.

Whisky’s shedding, in an intense grey, is mounted on a cradle mount just like this, and sits on a table in the corridor. Arranged around it are various copies of a book that documents the story of every one of the pets and pet owners that have taken part in the exhibition. Turning the everyday and the mundane into art, and giving it a profound, meditative meaning, is part of Ng’s practice: he is the artist who famously turned one of Hong Kong’s iconic trams into a roving camera obscura, in his mobile work called “25 Minutes Older” that premiered during the 2017 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.

Whisky’s presence is not only felt in the furry globe – we can see it in an even more directly cosmic representation, “33.8 Hz,” which is located in a small room dedicated to this very unusual installation. Three lounge chairs are arranged in front of a large screen, where a section of Whisky’s furry ball is projected as if we were staring at an image of the moon, or a planet taken from outer space, with a distant star shining from underneath it. The idea of such a mundane thing such as a globe of cat fur being projected in what looks like the cosmos is both amusing and profound, as if the love that links us to our animal companions could become a connection as vast as the universe in which we live. As we lie comfortably on the lounge chairs, our entire body is suddenly jolted by an intermittent sound, and a slight shaking, at the frequency of 33.8 hertz. It is Whisky’s purr – creating a truly immersive experience. 

Ng explains that German physicist Winfried Otto Schumann, in 1952, calculated the earth’s natural resonance, and recorded distinct peaks at 7.83, 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 hertz. The latter is very close to the frequency of not just Whisky’s, but every cat’s purr. These are called Schumann resonnances, and are used in climatic and geophysical observations. “A lot of the work I do is quite experiential, so it is not something that is just viewed from a distance,” says Ng. “It may be an immersive, participative work, and which can be experienced with different senses – the visual, the aural, the spatial experience, and even sometimes tactile. These are very important aspects to me.”

Here too, we can feel echoes of previous endeavours by Ng – most notably when he turned the cavernous Tai Hung Tung drainage tank on Boundary Street into a reflective work, “After the Deluge,” that was aimed at raising awareness of climate change and the unsung efforts of water management workers. Through a highly sensory and poetic installation, not unlike “33.8 Hz,” Ng put viewers in contact with our planet. In this newer instance, he projects our senses into an imaginary outer space where we feel more connected to the unseen and unknown – and part of a larger environment that we need to take care of better.

Musical Loom, Moirai, by Kingsley Ng, ‘Listen to the Sound of the Earth Spinning’ – Artwork: courtesy of the artist, Le Fresnoy, and the Osage Art Foundation

Listen to the Sound of the Earth Spinning is not just about our most loved animal companions, of course, as it pays homage to the world of textile beyond the felted furry globes. This being CHAT, Ng has integrated an ancient wooden loom he brought from Le Fresnoy, in northern France, where he studied at the National Studio of Contemporary Arts, and turned it into his 2005 piece “Musical Loom.” He acquired this 250-year-old Jacquard loom from a museum and fitted it with light sensors and a coded interface. As a result, this antique piece, which is no longer functional as a loom, has been turned into an instrument that can be played through light and shade. In demonstration, Ng waves his hands on top of the loom’s threads, and as the shadows block the light, music is created. “A lot of the works that I do are site specific and content specific, so the works are developed or extended from the situation and the location,” he says. “Having an invitation to create something at CHAT, a lot of my inspiration is related to textile.”

This is the first time that CHAT is hosting a solo exhibition by a Hong Kong artist, here presented with a 20-year retrospective of his practice. Honouring the venue in which his work is shown, Ng has found poetic and creative ways to extend as far as possible the meaning of weaving, spinning, and the different ways in which we connote the word “threads” to create a web of correspondence between living creatures and the stories that link us together. As CHAT curator Takahashi Mizuki says in the introductory panel, “Ng immerses us in a soundscape where we can listen to the spinning of the threads of life by humans and animals and the weaving of the fabric of this planet.” 

The loom and its vision of a connection between light, sound and textile fits particularly well in CHAT, which is housed in the former Nan Fung textile mills. But it is not site specific, having been created in France and exhibited several times over the past two decades. But another installation in the exhibition was created with this particular setting in mind. “Moirai” draws its name from the Greek goddesses of Fate, who hold the thread of human destiny in their hands. In this work, more than 200 pieces of rope hang in the dark, while light is projected onto them creating highly suggestive and ever-changing patterns that can be further changed by walking through them, or touching them and moving them.

Sound is one of the mainstays of Ng’s artistic practice, and one which is very prominent in Listen to the Sound of the Earth Spinning, as we can see from the use of a cat’s purring frequency, to the light and music that can now be produced from the ancient Jacquard loom. “I work a lot with the immaterial, so I often use sound and light as my media,” Ng explains. Interspersed among the furry globes, for example, are three music boxes, called “Listening Time,” in which visitors can insert a punch card as they turn a little crank that will produce the music. 

One of the music boxes plays a Japanese folk song called “Tanabata-sama,” which is traditionally sung during a festival by the same name, that celebrates romantic love. The festival originated in China many centuries ago, where it is called Qixi Festival (also known as Chinese Valentine’s Day), held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, the only day in the year in which two ill-fated mythical lovers, the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, also called Zhinü and Niulang, are allowed to meet. Another music box plays a song called “Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram” that is linked to Mahatma Gandhi and his revolutionary khadi movement, when he promoted locally spinning and weaving Indian cloth as a way of gaining self-sufficiency from British-imported cloth. The third box is less directly influenced by textile, and it plays “Au Lac de Wallenstadt” by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, a romantic and calming song that was written in 1848, a time of heightened political tensions in Europe that saw a series of anti-monarchical revolutions take place, from Sicily to Germany and France.  

These same songs are then played in another room displaying Ng’s “Songs of the Weavers,” in which an oscillating piece of string is made to move in the dark according to the music, while a blue, white or golden light is projected onto it, together with fragments of text from ancient poetry. The effect is mesmerising, as our eyes follow the oscillating piece of string trying to foresee its movements according to the notes being played.

In this way, most of the works are linked to each other, either through music or through textile and textual references, creating not just an immersive experience, but also a desire to revisit the same rooms more than once, as the various threads create a stronger connection, seducing the imagination.

Listen to the Sound of the Earth Spinning runs at CHAT until November 10, 2024. Click here for more information.