All posts tagged: Hong Kong

Hong Kong, mon Amour

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Message Personnel. Voici maintenant près de 7 mois que je vis à Hong Kong. Cette ville et ses habitants me fascinent toujours autant. Hong Kong est une ville unique au monde parce qu’à mon sens, elle est ce parfait point de basculement entre l’Ouest et l’Est. Elle vous est à la fois totalement familière et totalement étrangère. C’est une jungle urbaine où l’on peut étouffer de chaleur mais avec des plages magnifiques où l’on peut passer des journées inoubliables. Elle est à la fois très chinoise et pas très chinoise. Elle fait partie d’un pays communiste tout en étant l’économie la plus libérale du monde. Très riches. Très pauvres. Elle est à la fois très belle et très laide. Hong Kong est tout et son contraire. Voilà en quoi elle me fascine. C’est une ville dont se dégage une sensuelle virilité tandis que la feminité de ses habitantes vous frappe au premier abord. A Hong Kong, tout est possible et rien ne l’est. Qu’est-ce qui a construit cette ville? La colonisation britannique avec ses guerres de …

Wikibuilding: The User-Generated Urbanism

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The topic is not really new. At the end of the 2000s,  some sociologists and urban planners had prefigured the emergence of a “city 2.0” referring to the emergence of collaborative practices on the Internet: blogs , Wikipedia and maps that made digital more prevalent in our cities. Even though collaborative planning is not necessarily linked to digital, the consultation process is now common for most urban projects. Thereforce, user-generated urbanism might be the future of cities. In France, the phenomenon has reached a new level with the birth of Wikibuilding. The building would be designed within a wiki process, all plans and experimentations being open source. Any citizen would be able to draw, to use, to improve or to test the building. Promoters or insurers would test the wikibuilding with residents, real estate agencies and 5% of the area would be reserved for a living Lab. Wikibuilding would be a place for experimentation and open to the architecture schools in order to design and include continuous Open Design updates. The Paris School of Architecture is already …

Hong Kong: Inside Zhu Jinshi’s Boat

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Born in Beijing in 1954, Zhu Jinshi moved to Germany in the mid-1980s, and at present lives and works in Beijing. Zhu began painting abstract works in the late 1970s, and participated in the Stars group exhibition, the first avant-garde art exhibition held after the Cultural Revolution. The core of Zhu’s artistic practice is most fittingly characterized by traditional Chinese aesthetics, which emphasises the harmony between human beings and the natural world. Part of the legendary generation of artists who left China in the 1980s, Zhu Jinshi was clearly marked by his move to another country and culture. He used contemporary Western art languages to find the contemporary possibilities in the cultural resources and materials of China. At Exchange Square in Hong Kong, visitors are immediately greeted by Zhu Jinshi’s monumental Boat. Bamboo, cotton and 8,000 sheets of pale white Xuan (rice) paper meticulously hang from the ceiling, forming a spherical tunnel and stopping just before touching the ground. “I used materials, thoughts, and traditions of the East as a tool to go against the …

Hong Kong-born Artist Paul Chan Wins Prestigious Prize In NY

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The artist Paul Chan was awarded the prestigious Hugo Boss prize in New York last week. Initiated in 1996, the prize is awarded every two years to an artist who has made “a significant contribution to the evolution of the contemporary visual arts“. Paul Chan is prototypical of his generation, exploiting the potential of the World Wide Web and its information overkill to excess, redesigning it and establishing links with goal-oriented, unbridled enthusiasm. He has already created a wide-ranging oeuvre that reveals him to be one of the most inventive and multifaceted practitioners in contemporary art. His studies of current political and social issues, as well as the great and timeless concerns of history, literature, and philosophy, are incorporated into his art with lighthearted verve. More about Paul Chan http://bit.ly/1xHql3C