Undercurrents: A New Artistic Residency Takes Root in Hong Kong

Colourful Asian birds provide the muted, olive-green landscape with its only dashes of primary colour. Larger-than-life monkeys hang in the foliage. Near the centre, amid a sea of leaves, sits a distinctive two-storey village house that locals will know can only be found in Ma Wan. The sprawling, surreal scene is framed by a pair of bridges stretching in opposite directions — linking the tiny island to Tsing Yi in the east and Lantau in the west. A sign surrounded by growth reads “保持暢通” (bou2 ci4 coeng3 tung1): keep clear. 

Titled Locus Amoenus, or “pleasant place” in Latin, this fantastical forest measures almost 1.7 metres wide. To the right of this imposing canvas hang two intimate watercolours on silk, a material used in traditional Chinese painting, depicting the bauhinia, Hong Kong’s official flower. Further right, three whimsical sketches highlight beauty and absurdity in the city’s street life: a dog owner watches from a neighbouring rooftop as his leashed canine urinates in a pet toilet; a father and son wield a huge dragon kite, its string stretching through a Repulse Bay skyscraper’s “dragon gates” (龍門 lung4 mun4) — the gaping holes between floors, left open according to feng shui lore to allow dragons passage from the mountains to the sea. 

All six of these images are the work of Czech painter Michal Bačák, who spent 10 weeks soaking up the local environment and channelling what he saw and felt into his work. “It’s beautiful to see Hong Kong as a very cultural place, actually,” says Bačák, a guest of WestK’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence Pilot Programme. It was the illustrator’s third visit to the city, following a group exhibition at Grotto Gallery in March, yet the opportunity to live and work on the largely car-free island presented a very different side of the city. “That’s why I’m saying that,” he continues. “Because I heard that there is this rumour that Hong Kong is this cultural desert, which is not true at all for me. It’s very motivating and inspiring to be in Hong Kong.”

Bačák, one of five visiting Czech artists, currently has works on display in Undercurrents, a group show at Ma Wan 1868, the colourful, redeveloped arts community just a stone’s throw from where the works were created. Underlining this sense of place, Bačák’s large-scale piece was sketched with homemade charcoal — wood cut from the fruit trees in his garden and intentionally baked to create a medium of expression. But because his usual medium is ink, one of the residency’s most meaningful moments for the Czech illustrator was a visit to the studio of acclaimed contemporary ink artist Hung Hoi. His son, Hung Fai, was one of six local artists also participating in the residency. Sharing an interest in ink, the two younger artists became fast friends.

In Undercurrents, Hung Fai contributed a single, powerful piece, “Maze III.” Hung stabbed dense ink patterns into folded porous paper; when the sheets are unfolded, they reveal a repeating pattern of fading facsimiles and mirrored prisms, with each layer becoming incrementally less distinct. Seen from a distance, the complete work might recall a bucolic landscape, but in his rapid lines, Fai channels the frenzy of urban life; his slow dots are a meditative act of finding peace amid the bustle. “There’s an emotional feeling when you are like dotting, just like gathering thoughts,” says Fai. “The lines are just like really fast paced city living — it’s a combination of these two different emotions.”

Emotional landscape are also found in the works of Hong Konger Mari Liew, whose surrealist watercolour “The Riddle of Mist” contrasts with the quiet melancholy of two monochrome lithographs documenting dreamlike environments where cleansing bodies of water appear as sources of vitality.

The coral sea

As a pilot programme, Undercurrents was conceived without a grand theme — its goal simply to unite 11 divergent creatives in shared experiences. However, the residency’s remote seafront location might explain the concern with ecological issues and the climate crisis that marks out many of the works. 

Sculptor Nikola Emma Ryšavá was surprised when, a day before setting off to Hong Kong, a pigeon flew into her bedroom. She took it as an omen to celebrate the infamous “rats of the sky,” a bemoaned fixture of public spaces in both Prague and Hong Kong, in the 1.7-metre-tall sculpture “Columnbia.” 

“I just really like pigeons and I find it fascinating that people really don’t like them,” says Ryšavá, whose preoccupation is rooted in the irony of human shortsightedness: it was humankind that brought these aerial rodents into our cities in the first place. “We domesticated them to send messages, we brought them here, and then when we had no use for them, we abandoned them.” In Czechia, she supports NGOs building pigeon houses offering pigeons a “more human life,” but points out that in Ma Wan she would face a fixed penalty of HK$5,000 for feeding pigeons from her balcony. “Honestly, I think I made friends for life,” she adds of her stay in the city.

Her Ma Wan housemate was apparently already a friend — Markéta Kolářová, a mixed-media artist who spends half of every year in the Philippines working on coral conservation, a theme that recurs throughout her energised, evocatively physical work. An arresting trio of pieces created in Hong Kong — “Substrate,” “Threshold” and “Expansion” — each depicts a human face in oils, framed by plaster coral, with the figures slowly being subsumed by nature. “Since we don’t have any sea, people at home are always asking like, why do you do coral? Why do you care?” she muses. “But even if we don’t have elephants, we should take care of the elephants.”

Activist first, artist second, Kolářová has already been approached by a marine biologist in Hong Kong about a potential awareness-raising exhibition. If it goes ahead, she might consider collaborating again with her compatriot, Patrik Kriššák, whose colourful canvases have long employed coral as a powerful signifier for the urgent climate crisis. The residency gave the artist the chance to add nuance and perspective, connecting with climatologists at the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. These new scientific insights perhaps fuelled the vigour of the six new works he displayed in Undercurrents — especially the striking, large-scale pair “Acropora” and “The Vanishing (Whip Coral II).”

“In Prague, he was using coral as a symbol,” says the exhibition’s co-curator, Joyce Wong. “But in Hong Kong he actually gets to be in proximity with the organism and its biome, so I think it’s been a very fruitful trip for him — it’s added more depth to his work, and given him new ideas about what to depict, the forms and the colours that he wants to use.”

In the same spirit of exchange, neon art pioneer Jive Lau gained inspiration from Ryšavá and Kolářová use of concrete as a medium. “It’s a rare opportunity where I can really know and observe how it works,” he says. His sole contribution to the exhibition, “Foam Symphony,” also looks to the sea with a green neon tube punctuated by air bubbles. “Normally, I just trap myself in the studio most of the time,” he adds. “But being here in nature, I’ve had space for inner self observation. It’s been very calm, peaceful, and I can focus a lot of time to do this new work here.”

Under, and beyond

Spending time so close to the sea also inspired Vvzela Kook to turn her gaze underwater. Her most ambitious previous work, Confidential Records: Dual Metropolitans, imagined an alternate future in which the Kowloon Walled City had survived underground. During the residency, the Hong Kong new media artist used the same technology to construct a virtual environment imagining the fate of the Jumbo Floating Restaurant after it capsized in the South China Sea in 2022. “Whenever a traditional thing leaves Hong Kong, people think that kind of represents Hong Kong, right?” muses the artist.

Navigable by visitors with a game controller, the interactive exhibit is based on dozens of pictures the artist took of the iconic floating eatery in the days after its closure was announced in 2020. “I’m generally fascinated by the things that are complicated and not existing anymore,” adds the artist, who is also working on a virtual reconstruction of the former prison at Tai Kwun. “More and more people are starting to talk about nostalgia as a phenomenon — to me, nostalgia is actually a kind of psychological symptom.”

While Kook’s tech-centric methodology looks to the future, her compatriot Rivian Cheung embraced traditional bamboo-and-paper crafting techniques to construct a trio of animal-like figures installed around a gallery pillar. “It’s kind of a dying art, right?” says Cheung, who translated a childhood fascination into artistic practice when she began studying the craft in 2019, learning to make the bamboo dragons and paper lanterns used in traditional ceremonies. “I loved these things as a kid, and once I had a chance to learn it, I really got into it — and started [using these] materials in making my own art.”

While their arrangement references the circular path of dragons in traditional ceremonies, the animals that comprise “The Offshot” began as naked dried branches. Cheung adorned the natural wood with organic materials — plant fibres, bamboo splints, rice paper strips and linen — composing an upward evolutionary progression, beginning with an earthbound snail and ending with a mythical winged creature taking flight. “Those paper-crafting techniques were traditionally used to bring myths to life,” says Cheung. “Bamboo is a kind of connection between all these things — those myths and characters and spirits are inside my work.”

As a pilot programme, this residency was undoubtedly a success, in both the work it created and the connections it forged. Rumour has it artists from Saudi Arabia and Paraguay are under consideration for the next residency cycle. The spirit of exchange might be summed up in Undercurrents’ sole collaborative piece, “Becoming,” a sculpture co-created by Tobias Klein and Zdeněk Vacek. The latter, a goldsmith and jewellery designer, saw a deeper meaning in bringing pearls he had previously sourced in China back to Asia from Czechia. Here he used them to ornament a gongshi — or scholar’s rock, a naturally formed stone traditionally prized by Chinese scholars — sourced by Klein. The Hong Kong-based artist also embellished the stone with 3D-printed resin to symbolise fresh life growing out of the seemingly stagnant stone.

“I think it’s really nice to see that actually, even though a lot of the subjects that Hong Kong artists might care about are specific to local narratives or culture, there are certain techniques that are also universal — certain directions and approaches to artwork that can be shared with artists from overseas as well,” adds Wong. “This work is really able to capture that because they’ve married both of their interests and techniques to create the sculpture.”

Undercurrents is on display at Ma Wan 1868 until 2 August 2026. Click here for more information.

Join our special and exclusive guided visit with co-curator Joyce Wong on the 1st of August. For more details check here.