it's a very overwhelming show, very unlike anything anyone seems to have seen before. It's almost like a mini Venice Biennale as there's so much going on with a dozen different films, large neons, sculptures, human forms, skate ramp....it's pretty crazy.
The local press all came through on Friday, Apple Daily, Ming Pao Daily News, Milk magazine, and many more. They all seemed very bewildered! But in a good way. I guess many of these guys had no frame of reference not having seen anything like this before. They didn't quite know what to make of it all but they clearly liked it.
Of course it's easy to throw people in HK as they have no experience of this kind of thing but it will be interesting to see the reaction of serious curators and gallery people from overseas at the end of May when the big HK art fair is on.
It's been an extremely long and difficult road to realise the show, especially as much of what we've done are considered firsts in HK.
No-one has ever built art on this scale so that means any professionals (carpenters, steelworkers, managers, film makers, etc) have had no experience of putting something like this together.
The creation of the show has literally helped develop human cultural software in HK. Which is good for the next project, we now have an amazing team of resources to pool in future, people that now kinda have a clue about how installation works.
We sill have a few technical dramas. A film in 3D on 4 screens on a tiny budget is a really pushing it so it's not quite Avatar quality but with a couple more days of fine tuning we should be ok. Same with the hologram which has just never been done in HK before, let alone in art. The green screen work, for the film of the girl falling, should have cost the entire show budget by itself but we only had 100kHK$ and 2 days to get it right so it's not perfect but as good as we could do with the restrictions. I hope it doesn't have a negative impact on the audiences perception.
PR and project management has also been a huge challenge as there's so much to manage. It really is like building a Hollywood movie for 1% of the budget. This show, to produce properly, would have taken a few million US$'s, not HK dollars.
This management means the work suffers as I've been too busy trying to get lights to work and not having enough control over content but I'll continue to try to sharpen the edges of the show over the next weeks.
I'm very tired, haven't slept more than a few hours for weeks. Went out last night and got hammered too but had soo much fun.
Hopefully things will calm down a bit over the coming couple of weeks but still much to do, especially paperwork to keep the government happy. A lot of pressure from them to perform. The fund that are potentially giving us some money are under constant scrutiny as to how they spend their money so they pass that pressure on to us always warning us that if the show isn't successful we'll be in deep shit.
But I'm not too worried about that, I think as people start to hear about the show it will snowball through word of mouth and in a couple of weeks they'll be lining up to get in. HK is always like that though we'll continue to hit the PR side as hard as possible with our limited budget. We don't have money for big fancy ad campaigns but I'm sure the people of HK will do the work for us.
Anyone reading this blog can do us a favour and pass on the show info to everyone possible.
I got an hour to just sit in the space yesterday and watch some of the films start to finish and observe people doing the same. People seemed amazed.
I'm still not happy with the show, lots of little details that irritate me but I'm always like that, never happy with my work, can always do better. But the show is pretty insane. It feels like a complete escape from the real world. As if you've just fallen down the rabbit hole and for the time you're inside, the real world fades away.
My friend Amanda wandered around for ever yesterday and ended up having a little sleep in one of the cinemas, she felt so peaceful and relaxed in the space. I can see that people will come again and again just to escape and dream.
If that happens then it really will be a success.
Some images from the 3D film and the green screen work of the girl falling.
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