(Street) Signs of Life: Inside Prosper Legault’s Residency at Current Plans

We visit the French artist to understand how his many skills are being put to use on the streets of Hong Kong

Like many cities where art is a part of its identity to the world, Paris boasts a storied history of artists for whom finding a way to live and work there is the endgame. Prosper Legault is no exception. He left his coastal hometown of La Rochelle at 16 years old, moving to Paris to experience his vision of an urban dreamscape. But as the artist shared with us over several studio visits during his residency at Current Plans, life in the City of Lights led to another kind of luminous fixation: neon. 

The medium features heavily in his artworks, ranging from freestanding pieces to wall works, and often involves other found signage from his walkabouts, both in Paris and in other cities he may find himself — including Hong Kong for his residency and upcoming exhibition.

In many ways, Legault’s is a familiar story: the way he and so many others have come to understand how urban life can turn on a dime, from one’s dream destination to its often more difficult daily reality, and where street life for some is decidedly unromantic, being a last resort. For Legault, who is primarily a sculptor, the city is often the springboard from which to source materials for his work. The results relay these experiences by offering insight into the artist’s life, both as a means of finding one’s own way, and for making one’s art. 

In fact, Legault’s preference for picking through the city’s remains reveal how neon signage and metalworks literally make up the language in his art. Embedded in Legault’s oeuvre, they also tell the story of those for whom this urban salvage serves as documentation of their lives as shop owners, sign makers, and who through their fonts, languages, graphics, and material handiwork, hold a place within the evolution of a city. As such, given Legault’s source material and approach to life as both artist and city dweller, improvisation is key.  

This was a lesson Legault learned early in his move to Paris, where he initially turned to metalwork and woodworking before attending the Beaux-arts de Paris for six years, where his accreditation became a mix from both formal training and what he learned from various trades.

While other artists were focused solely on graduating from art school, Legault was earning his graduate degree in street aesthetics — making work by day and hanging out with a graffiti crew by night. All told, Legault amassed a knowledge base that privileges a DIY hands-on approach: in Hong Kong, this has included taking down, reassembling, wiring and soldering parts of an old neon sign, saving it from the landfill and giving it new life as an artwork. 

First studio visit: Saturday 28 January 2026

As we enter Current Plans for the first of two studio visits, we are led to a private side room in the back, where we talk about how Legault found his way to Hong Kong. He met Current Plans founder Eunice Tsang in 2024 at Carré de Baudouin, a gallery space in Paris. That led to his residency — and to Legault being surrounded by neon tubes and found signs on a table and on the floor of his studio.

Over the course of the discussion, we share encyclopaedic references to an endless parade of street-oriented practitioners past and present. We recall early graffiti taggers like TAKI 183, active in New York in the late 1960s and early 70s, and collectors like Martin Wong, a painter who documented and collected graffiti. We also talk about artists like Richard Baquié the late Jason Rhodes and other associated links to neon, pop, and street culture, from hip hop music to the artists, exhibitions, and markets they have spawned globally, including possible crossovers with those in the Hong Kong scene, from Ocean Leung to Frog King.  

In assembling his found objects, themselves imbued with the history of their original makers, Legault helps generate a fresh conversation about urban environments and their influence, confluence and in-between status in terms of being both forms of reclamation and documentation.    

Our conversation ends with more philosophical questions about neon’s legacy relative to other forms of street culture over many years: does it embody heritage or symbolise appropriation when adapted across cultures? Now, having access to localised forms of “liquid” and linguistic art, like ink, artist’s books, and graphic novels, Legault is quick to reveal a favourite source of inspiration, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (1970), which leads himself to interrogate the meaning of appropriation as he forms original artwork from moments of contemplation, research, and study during his residency.

Second studio visit: Friday 30 January 2026

We make our second visit to the studio almost a week later. This time, the setting for producing any work to be exhibited in the coming weeks has changed dramatically. The closed-door, interior back-room studio has since shifted out-of-doors to an expansive garden terrace. Overlooking the MTR stop for the district of Wong Chuk Hang, now considered a gallery hub for visitors, only adds to the area’s ambience.

There, a large wooden table boasts tools and items from works in progress, although all the pieces, once complete, will be exhibited inside. Elsewhere, benches, hammocks, lawn chairs, plants and a cooker are strewn about on the astroturf, well-worn from lending itself to the growing number of cultural and social events taking place as part of Current Plans’ larger programme.

For Legault, it’s a place to show what finds and progress he has made, including several sculptures in various stages of development. Some have overlapping metal strips and switches already in place, while others will feature adapted signage to be lit from within, and with all currently taking rectilinear shapes, like pedestals. Incorporating assemblage and collage with metal and electronics adds a sensibility akin to Nam Jun Paik to the mix. Eventually, he pulls out the star attraction, carefully removing neon letters from a cardboard box he used to transfer them to the studio. The tubes once arranged on the fake grass, spell DINER, belying their point of origin as the former proud sign of a now-closed restaurant where Legault originally found them.

While this is par for the course — neon signs being removed as businesses and regulations change — they are also being preserved, collected and documented through publications, including the newly released Zolima Culture Guide, Neon Is Not Dead: The Future of a Hong Kong Icon. In effect, all these initiatives are designed to encourage collective cultural ownership for anyone wishing to conduct further study on neon’s extensive regional history.

The visit turns from observation to conversation sparked by what has already been seen and discussed — interactions which reveal as much about the visitor as it does the artist himself in terms of what will end up as the real outcome through the exhibition. Thus, residencies like this one are part studio, part think tanks and part presentation venue, where ideas for works, as much as the works themselves, are protected and nurtured in private before they are shared publicly and will ideally resonate for years to come.

In this case, Legault is producing artwork that leans into the efficient pace of the city, even for the short time that he is spending in Hong Kong. The result will be around six pieces with a little more than two weeks before his one-week show opens Saturday 7 February at Current Plans. The artist, who is also a singer, will then have works included in the upcoming second edition of the Pavilion art fair, taking place for the first time in Hong Kong from 23 to 28 March.

In a time when being an artist is an art in itself, and where scouring social media appears like its own form of performance art, Prosper Legault insists on the real thing. Having learned both the thought processes and skills necessary for making his creations, he still shapes material reality by way of calloused hands; here, the result of visiting local Hong Kong hardware shops — themselves supplying the ever-changing exterior and interior cityscape, but also in service to artists like himself who represent it through their art.

Taking a collage approach and assemblage aesthetic incumbent upon his engagement with the urban environment, Legault is rewarded with a treasure trove of raw material in return. In the end, he may have déjà vu as he scours the streets for inspiration — because like Paris, it can still be found everywhere in Hong Kong.

Discover Prosper Legault’s work at Current Plans from 7 to 14 February 2026. For more information, click here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained several inaccuracies regarding Legault’s education. It has since been updated. We apologise for the errors.