Flow with Big Mountain

Chuen Lung Visual Research Archive Finale

Chuen Lung Visual Research Archive is a key research initiative curated by the Hong Kong International Photo Festival at Koon Man Space. The project brings together eight artists and research partners, working across multiple perspectives—including sound, vernacular knowledge, twenty‑four‑hour everyday life in the 1960s, movement and migration, local use and imagination, as well as seeds and natural ecology—to progressively collect, organise, and establish a visual and situated archive of Chuen Lung.

Throughout 2025, the project unfolded through three Open Studio presentations, offering the public access to different stages of the research process. These encounters invited audiences to engage closely with Chuen Lung and to observe how artists respond to memory, lived experience, and the accumulation of local knowledge through sustained interaction with place.

Flow with Big Mountain does not mark the conclusion of the research, but rather a moment of continuation and re‑articulation. The exhibition brings together outcomes from earlier phases while foregrounding participation as an essential component of the archive itself—one that emerges not only from researchers and artists, but also from villagers whose long‑term involvement has shaped the project. Among them, Mr. Tsang Kim Man, a Chuen Lung villager who participated extensively in the project, is presented as an artist in his own right; his hand‑drawn works will be exhibited as part of the show.

In addition to presenting research outcomes, seven artist–research partners have created new works specifically for Flow with Big Mountain. The exhibition extends beyond the indoor gallery of Koon Man Space into outdoor areas and further throughout Chuen Lung Village, situating artistic practice within the rhythms of village life. The curatorial team regards all Chuen Lung villagers as participating artists in this project—whether as contributors to the archive, collaborators in research, or visitors whose interactions and responses during the exhibition period actively shape this continuously evolving archive.

By shifting from modes of viewing toward practices of participation, Flow with Big Mountain seeks to transform the archive from a static repository into an extension of relationships—one that remains in motion among artists, villagers, researchers, and audiences alike. Responding to contemporary artistic concerns with co‑creation, relationality, and process, the exhibition opens new chapters through acts of transmission, allowing the story of Chuen Lung to continue unfolding through collective involvement.

Curators

Villager-co-curation Advisory Committee

Wong Yuk Ling            Alice Leung

Tsang Kim Man

Man Gor’s Life Map

Man Gor’s Life Map is based on the daily life of Tsang Kim Man (Man Gor) in Chuen Lung Village, depicting memories and stories of his upbringing at Tai Mo Shan. Since childhood, he roamed the mountains and wilderness, familiar with every inch of land in Chuen Lung. His paintings are a living map, connecting the village’s scenery, its people, and the traces of time.

In Man Gor’s memory, Chuen Lung was a leisurely place, free from bustling crowds. The mountains and forests offered many things to eat—yellow eels, catfish, stream snails, freshwater shrimp—and there were also swimming holes where he would soak for hours. His paintings capture these everyday moments: village children playing by the streams, the smoke from cooking fires in the mountains, and even how weather changes affected the villagers’ way of life. Each painting reflects his deep connection to Chuen Lung and serves as a tribute to his life.

Sunny Wong

River of Memory

Slender wooden stakes are inserted into the riverbed. Their blue-painted tips form a broken line that marks the river’s highest water level from a past year—an irreversible boundary. Enlarged photographs of people once playing in the river are installed across the now‑calm river channel, juxtaposed with the present landscape. Although the images fix the river of that summer in time, the water itself has long since moved on.

Sitting by the riverbank, voices drift overhead—oral histories carried by the current:

 “This used to be our swimming pool…….”
“After heavy rain, the stones would almost completely shift……”
“When we were young, we used colored pebbles like chalk, drawing on the large rocks…”

The work reflects on memory as a form of flooding—something that repeatedly washes over the present. Time, landscape, and perception remain in constant motion. Like the river, they do not pause; the same river can never be encountered twice.

Yim Sui Fong

Gwo Lung Tong

This work approaches the entire village of Chuen Lung as an instrument to be played. Drawing inspiration from the Kolintang—a traditional percussion instrument composed of multiple bamboo elements struck to create rhythm—the artist constructs an experimental sound device using materials collected around the village, including bamboo, stones, and everyday objects. Through linking, suspending, and juxtaposing these items, the installation allows sound to emerge through acts of striking, falling, and retrieval.

The project is anchored in two conceptual threads. The first is an attempt to “listen to what already exists in Chuen Lung”: rather than transforming objects into musical notes, the work attends to the inherent tones and rhythms embedded within the materials themselves.  The second is “picking up and holding”—a repeated gesture rooted in villager Man Gor’s childhood memories of collecting fallen pine needles, opening up reflections on the relationship between land, body, and community.

Rooted in a childhood memory, the instrument evolves through movement, collision, and the chance rhythms generated by interaction. The act of playing—through curiosity, experimentation, and missteps—opens up a space of resonance with the village, inviting ongoing exchange with its environment.

Benjamin Hao

Returning to Chuen Lung

Returning to Chuen Lung — Migration, Lived Histories, and Evolving Forms
Through field visits and conversations with villagers in Chuen Lung, I came to understand the village as a uniquely situated place. Close to the urban core yet distinctly its own, Chuen Lung retains a relatively intact village fabric and a visible continuity of stories passed across generations. It stands apart, but remains intricately connected to wider Hong Kong through countless social, economic, and historical threads. The community—comprising indigenous villagers, long‑term residents, and people who regularly come here—forms overlapping networks of migration, learning, and daily life.

At the same time, I sensed in each villager a strong, adaptive relationship to their environment—an ability to make use of available resources and, through this, to develop ways of living that are deeply personal. Mr. Law Kwok Sang’s calligraphy sun-hat and watercress‑harvesting pedal board; Janney’s self-made aprons and bamboo weeding tool; the stylish workwear of the Choi Lung restaurant’s boss lady; Ho yin’s shift in identity sparked by the pull of Chuen Lung; and Man Gor (Tsang Kim-man)’s multiple talents and layered life experiences—all speak to an evolving, place-specific creativity.

For the installation on the grass lawn, I drew inspiration from the wooden boards once used at Yuet Lai Farm for harvesting watercress. These boards, reinterpreted in various shapes, carry imprints of interviews, collected materials, and photographs from five villagers and community members. Together, they trace Chuen Lung’s flows and connections—from the 1960s to today—revealing the subtle relationships between the village and the world beyond.Visitors are invited to arrange the boards freely across the lawn. Their shifting configurations open up new encounters, allowing the work to change continuously through collective participation.

Mono Tung

Three Times of Chuen Lung · When Air Holds Memory

This project unfolds through time, translating villagers’ reflections on the past, present, and future into AI-generated moving images and participatory inflatable structures. Oral memories are transformed into a continuously evolving visual system that assembles layered perceptions of place and story. Through air, colour, and bodily interaction, visitors actively participate in reconnecting local memory and collectively imagining what lies ahead.

Vangi Fong

Chuen Lung Seed-graphy

 
Kites in the air, seeds in the soil. This work brings images of Chuen Lung seeds onto the surface of a kite, revealing forms that are usually concealed beneath the ground. Seeds, transmitted across generations, carry traces of ecological adaptation as well as the memories and conditions of a particular place. They function as repositories of time, bearing the imprint of lived and environmental histories.

Project Crow

Wild Properties

“Heaven’s yields are cultivated as hidden virtue and safeguarded through rites.
Earth’s yields are cultivated as manifest virtue and safeguarded through music.
Through rites and music, the transformations of Heaven and Earth and the production of all things are brought together for the harmony of the spirits, the people, and all beings.”
— Rites of Zhou: Offices of Spring

Our perspective of the Land changes over time. In contemporary usage, the Land is often seen as an asset, and much is focused on ownership, tenure, and real estate. In the Rites of Zhou, the Land is discussed alongside Heaven, and it is the productive capacity of all plants and animals that matters. When resources are taken with restraint, not only do the people benefit, but the natural world also remains in balance and harmony.

This project presents portraits of nature “indigenous residents” in close proximity to human dwellings in the village, while reflecting on where suitable habitats for them might be found. Although these imagination processes are informed by ecological research and observation, they are inevitably shaped by human perspectives. Borrowing the visual language of real estate signage, the project reframes the act of searching for housing from an animal’s point of view. It does not propose a transaction, but instead invites a reconsideration of how we perceive land, value, and the coexistence of all living beings.

Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden

Plants, People and Village Life: Ethnobotanical Stories of Chuen Lung

Ethnobotany is the study of the dynamic relationships formed between people and plants over time, typically focusing on the use, traditional knowledge, belief systems, management methods and classification of plants within certain societies, both past and present. In the absence of globalised, mainstream influences, indigenous people once developed cultural practices unique to their societies, reflecting both the breadth of ideas of importance to their lives and the materials available for their use.

With poor accessibility to Tsuen Wan and other nearby towns in the past due to the area’s convoluted topography, the villagers’ rich ethnobotanical knowledge evolved and enabled the village to thrive despite limited resources. Surrounded by secondary forest, the villagers often utilised natural products collected from their environs to support and embellish their daily lives. Nowadays, the use of local plants is slowly being forgotten, but some villagers still keep their memories in mind.

The collaboration between Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG) and Chuen Lung Village seeks to document various ways in which plants have traditionally been used by villagers through a process of accessing and expressing oral histories, observed through a lens of contemporary expertise in plant ecology. It is hoped that, overall, this project will boost public awareness of local plants within the changing environment – both natural and human – in Chuen Lung Village itself, as well as more broadly in the Tai Mo Shan area, via diverse participatory methods, while emphasising elements of native species conservation.