ANiMAL: Art Science Nature Society Exhibition - 3rd Collaboration between City University of Hong Kong and National Palace Museum

This unique exhibition of animals presents to the public a fascinating blend of the old and the new, the classical and the modern, traditional art and high-tech creative media, drawing on the strengths of City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and the rich artistic heritage of collections held at National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei.

Animals from different historical eras are the focal point of the exhibition, which has been organised by CityU and NPM in their third such collaborative project. Titled “ANiMAL: Art Science Nature Society”, the exhibition joins together NPM’s rich Chinese painting and sculpture collections with latest artistic media techniques developed at CityU’s School of Creative Media.   

The exhibition showcases various representation animals in different eras, using ultra-high-resolution facsimiles of NPM’s Chinese classical art treasury, digital and interactive installations, projection mapping, augmented and virtual reality, movies, photographs, sculptures, paintings and music. 

Research from the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences at CityU is supporting the exhibition, too. 

The exhibition, held from 16 October to 30 December 2018, includes more than 40 Chinese and international artists’ work, ranging from historical pieces to contemporary, collaborative works from various galleries, collections and institutions. It is the 8th exhibition to be held at the CityU Exhibition Gallery.

Professor Jeffrey Shaw, Chair Professor at the School of Creative Media and the curator of the exhibition, invites audiences to explore the animal world through the lenses of art, science, nature and society for a fascinating and inspiring experience. Amongst the many highlights are The Lion by Liu Chiu-Te, originally completed in the Qing dynasty; an immersive interactive theatre Marvels within the Sea that illustrates Album of Sea Miscellany by Nie Huang, a biologist and painter from the Qing dynasty; and the 3D-printed bones of an Omura’s whale that visitors can interact with. 

Audiences can also encounter live horseshoe crabs in an aquarium; bats painted on a Qing dynasty vase whichcome alive when approached by the viewer; CT scans of a dog and a cat that can be interactively explored; Eduardo Kac’s rabbit that glows in the dark; an installation by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau that allows visitors to create fantastical marine creatures that they can put into a pond and interact with; virtual reality visits to farms in Hong Kong, Australia and Switzerland; Ren Ri’s extraordinary wax sculpture created by bees; Zhao Gunaghui’s baby car born out of a giant egg; Trevor Young’s delicate assembly of seashells; and Almond Chu’s aesthetic photographs of horses, set side by side with a full-size horse sculpture onto which Guiseppe Castiglione’s Qing dynasty painted horses are projected on to. Topics related to global warming and environmental threats are represented in works such as Lu Guang’s dystopian photography.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: (i) Encyclopaedia, compendia and scientific inquiry, (ii) Auspicious symbols and homophonic puns, (iii) Mythical creatures and bestiaries from fantasy to manufactory and the popular imaginary, (iv) The harmony and disharmonies of animal and nature, and (v) Contemporary art’s revisioning of animal identity. Together they tell the compelling story of animals in art, science, nature and society. 

Following its debut in Hong Kong, the ANiMAL exhibition will travel to Taichung City Seaport Art Centre in Taiwan from 26 January to 5 May 2019.

A media preview and the opening ceremony of the exhibition will be held on 15 October with the following details:

Press kit with high resolution images can be downloaded at: https://goo.gl/dL6khW

About CityU Exhibition Gallery
CityU Exhibition Gallery has organised several art exhibitions that lie at the intersection of the arts and technology, offering fresh perspectives on the displays and providing interactive experiences for visitors. Previous exhibitions have included cross-cultural works by the Italian painter Giuseppe Castiglione; the cultural legacy and future of Hakka Kung Fu; unpublished handwritten materials by well-known Tsinghua Chinese scholars; innovative new media technology and 3D visualisation on Lingnan Hung Kuen Kung Fu; and the interdisciplinary “Cabinets of Curiosities. From the Natural Sciences to the Art of Nature”.