The artist’s new video transforms the facade of Hong Kong’s M+ museum into a beacon of hope

Ulanda Blair

Ellen Pau’s The Shape of Light: Healing through the Heart Sutra

In the 1990s, the Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau collected video footage of lighthouses – symbols of navigation projecting comforting illumination. Now, with The Shape of Light, Pau transforms the expansive M+ Façade, which overlooks Victoria Harbor, into a digital lighthouse, serving, in her words, as ‘a guardian shining a light to all travelers and homecomers.’Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, the project is a 14-minute video created for the LED screen embedded in the M+ building. Combining volumetric videography and a live-action performance, the work projects a message of healing to a city still reeling from Covid-19. Central to the work is a figure performing a sign-language interpretation of the Heart Sutra, a foundational Buddhist text. Its core themes of light and darkness, form and emptiness, resonate with Pau’s longstanding engagement with video’s formal qualities, as well as the work’s presence in West Kowloon as part of Hong Kong’s illuminated skyline.The artist is a fixture of Hong Kong’s experimental art scene and has shaped visual culture there for four decades. A founder of Videotage and the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, she has also collaborated with Zuni Icosahedron, the boundary-pushing theater troupe established in the early 1980s. In addition, she continues to work as a diagnosis radiographer. Her iconic work <a href="https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/recycling-cinema-2016888/">Recycling Cinema</a> (1998) is currently on view as part of <a href="https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/exhibitions/hong-kong-here-and-beyond/">Hong Kong: Here and Beyond</a>. Ulanda Blair, Curator of Moving Image at M+, interviewed Pau via email prior to the commission’s launch.

You accepted our invitation for the M+ Facade commission in November 2021, just as M+ opened. What did you think?I wanted to do something public that would bring positivity to Hong Kongers. The extended battle with the coronavirus has loomed over us, sometimes causing stress and fatigue. With the building forming part of Hong Kong’s skyline, I felt that the light it emits can be shared by everyone. It stands like a lighthouse, giving us direction and hope.Can you explain the piece’s formal and thematic ideas? The M+ Facade is outdoors, which means that its light can join the ever-changing light from the sun, moon, and stars, linking us to nature. This is a juxtaposition of what we can control, the video facade, with what we cannot – the lights from the sky and the windows of the M+ offices behind the screen. The latter signify the presence of people who can come and go as they please. By the time we can see the light coming from beyond our planet, it has traveled for so long that what lit it might no longer exist. This is the ephemeral nature of life, with material elements reminding us of the immaterial.

What inspired The Shape of Light?I read about the rising number of people with depression in the past few years. I always felt that we lacked something that carried a positive message during these difficult times, such as the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster from World War II. Hardships suffered during the pandemic drove me to create something that could bring comfort in the form of light. Light allows us to perceive obstacles, but it also brings us the courage to overcome them. Those who know the Heart Sutra may be reminded of the beginning of the text: ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.’ To those who do not know it, I hope this artwork sparks curiosity.Your work has often addressed metaphysical and spiritual ideas, especially when it comes to the relationship between technology and humanity. Still, you haven’t addressed spirituality so explicitly in your previous work. Where did your interest in the Heart Sutra from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition come from? I did not intend for this work to carry a religious element. I studied the Heart Sutra after being inspired by Pik-yu, a longtime friend who happened to be Buddhist, whom I met in the 1980s. The text soothed her when she was in pain while in hospital. I hope that it can also bring peace to our city.

The Shape of Light is both light and dark, calming and energetic. What do these dual sensibilities signify?The Heart Sutra’s core meaning is emptiness and formlessness. To convey this idea, I kept the linear time structure throughout the video, through the choreography of the time-based sign language. Visually, I applied elements of duality, like yin and yang, inhaling and exhaling, darkness and light, chaos and control, blurriness and focus, noise and silence. It’s like the screens of our smartphones, which are like the lights of M+ and the city, something that we cannot escape but can be used for inspiration. How is your video site-specific? The building wouldn’t bear its current meaning if it did not form part of the Hong Kong skyline, outdoors, connecting with the sunlight and city lights. The work has a duality, with the layers acting as screens while merging with the surroundings. At the same time, the piece is a point in a network, just like our smartphones. Each smartphone user is a dot; the time we spend on it is a line; the world that the screen opens is a depth.

The video will be complemented by a live, durational performance at the museum, featuring digital visualizations of sound waves along with a sound bath using singing bowls and gongs. How will this performance augment the video?It plays out the concept of light and sound as waves of energy and as material for enlightenment. It expands the experience from daylight, through sunset, to the evening. The impermanence and existence in our cybernetic universe are seen through cycles of temporalities. It is a bardo, a liminal state between light and darkness, between sensing and knowing. We will live-code throughout the performance, weaving the impact of every moment into the work, which is then livestreamed. That is why I timed the performance to occur at sunset.You’re best known for video and new media art. Still, you’ve collaborated with experimental theater-makers at Zuni Icosahedron, choreographers like Dick Wong, and multidisciplinary sound artists like Samson Young. What attracts you to cross-disciplinary collaboration? I come from a science background, but was touched by the arts. I see reality as multidisciplinary. This generation lives through both the virtual world and the real world. Both run on our beliefs, desires, and dreams.

You co-founded Videotage, Hong Kong’s oldest video-art collective and archive, established in 1986, as well as the annual Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, established in 1996. What role do artist communities play in your practice and life?I treasure the experience of working with the art communities in Hong Kong and internationally. I learn a lot through them – they are my teachers.How do your dual careers as an artist and radiographer inform each other?As a radiographer I know how to produce an image, collect data, and interpret them. Being an artist requires similar knowledge. Both aspects of my professional life fulfill different parts of my aspirations, but the art is always dearer to my heart.Ulanda Blair is Curator of Moving Image at M+, Hong Kong. Please visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/an-interview-with-hong-kong-artist-ellen-pau/" target="_blank">mplus.org.hk</a> for&nbsp;the full interview.&nbsp;All full-bleed images: Ellen Pau, The Shape of Light, 2022. Site-specific&nbsp;moving image work for the M+ Facade. &copy; Ellen Pau.&nbsp;Please note that a dark filter has been laid over the top&nbsp;image for readability

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