TROPICAL IMAGINARIES

Tropical Imaginaries is inspired by the 1910 masterpiece “The Dream” by French artist Henri Rousseau. In this imaginary landscape, a “woman sleeping on this sofa dreams that she is transported into the middle of the forest, hearing the charmer's pipe.” In the same way, Tropical Imaginaries invokes a verdant jungle dreamscape against the concrete and grit landscapes of a high density subtropical city. This juxtaposition is at first glance a salve: Tropical Nature as escape from and as counterpoint to the City.

It is a window onto another world of lush green, abundant water and sunlight. Research has shown that a views onto nature can amplify physical and mental well-being. In this mural, this view expands, pushes forward, and, in stereoscopic distortion, floats free in ambiguous three-dimensional space. Viewed with the classic anaglyph red and cyan-lensed glasses the effect echoes a surreal dreamscape within the shifted composite double-image. It is a reminder of the tangled landscapes of Hong Kong’s wild, but distant, forests (remember, our Territory’s Nature too, was first imagined and then constructed before it was real). But Tropical Imaginaries is also not a picture of any specific nature, it is a digital recreation: a montage of textured surfaces in ambient and ray-traced reflective colours. Layered, complex, vibrant, diverse, audacious, it is a mirror of the city too.

Project

Mural

Size

15.5m(L) x 16m(H)

LOCATION

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

YEAR

2020