The exhibition “Beautiful Jailing: Tales of Extreme Density in the Pearl River Delta”, featuring some selected Hong Kong and Macau artists, was opened in Soi Nana, Chinatown, on 3rd of March of 2019. It was curated by architect Paco Garcia Moro and funded by Design Trust Foundation Hong Kong. “Beautiful Jailing” featured the works regarding identity and urban density of Parallel Lab, Adalberto Tenreiro, AaaM Architects and Dragon Dellusion. The project was presented at Project 189 Bangkok, a privately funded artist-in-residence programme and project space in the up and coming neighbourhood of Soi Nana in Bangkok’s bustling Chinatown. Since September 2015 a series of multi-disciplinary artists have lived in and transformed the refurbished shop house that is at the heart of Project 189 Bangkok.
Photos by Jom Sermpasit/Panoramic Studio
Same as a seemingly innocuous exponential equation makes hyperboloid asymptotes scale fast to infinity, the vortex of global economic and geopolitical forces converging in the Pearl River Delta produces urban habitats that take human living and social conditions to the extreme turning the Delta’s cartography stands as a fragmented, historical record of narratives,
legitimacies and legacies that coexist.
“Beautiful Jailing” does not aim to exhibit a catalog of architectural solutions articulated through a consistent ideology, most likely consisting in a structured narrative about the harsh
spatial restrictions of the daily battle in the urban spaces of the Delta. Instead Beautiful Jailing, instead offers a variety of solutions from which the public may take its own conclusions,
hoping that the product goes beyond the mere sequences of idiosyncrasies.
The purpose of “Beautiful Jailing” is to reconcile the incubation, colonization, conquering of the urban space which may, in turn, become a battle about urban space, spatial modes of production and, ultimately as a cultural identity. The featured works purposely look screamingly different, responding to work methods and thought schemes that may apparently look, when put together, like landed from different galaxies, but they all stand on the same overcrowded shores of the river delta. Such conflicts take place on the land cartography, on the spotless lanes and corridors of the shopping malls, in the cultured out of unmapped cross cultural
references and the projective spaces of Hong Kong Uchronia. From the utterly minimal shrines of Duckling Hill to the Cyborg Han emperors of Dragon Delusion. We want to combine proposals coming from radically different universes, from the technophilia of digital natives
to the parametric enthusiasm of AaaM to the literate sino-brazilian visions of Adalberto Tenreiro for Macau.
Market and space
In a suggesting visual metaphor, Charles Lefevre compared the meaningful inhabitation of space to a spider building her net through the performance of her body organs. The spider reads a space that did neither exist nor not-exist before any subjective apprehension, yet it
was merely undiscernible. By this analogy, it becomes visually clear how ludic and intuitive action make those interstitial spaces in amorphous mall acquire meaning and a genuine subjectivized existence.