It All Begins with a Word

Let words and poetry roam free

Reading ignites fancy, art fosters whimsy. Words are not just graphic, they can be reimagined in multifarious ways.

We live in a digital age awash in images. Can we find a moment to savour the rhythmic precision of short essays or the lyrical expansion of epic poetry? The lonely tram in Ye Si’s Freezing Night·Tram Depot becomes the springboard, and Liu Yichang’s inverted Chinese characters are recast through dancers’ body movements, as artists renew their vision in different media.

© Hung Keung & Creative Team

Following the interactive art piece in 2020, It All Begins with a Word enters the Hong Kong Central Library this year. Various installations centre on renowned local writers from the 1960s to the 1990s, as creative artists from different art forms respond to them with body movements and moving images.

Although literature can be transformed in space, original texts are never in danger of being lost in translation.

Click here for the Guided Appreciation to It All Begins with a Word.

Live Performance

Rosy view of words

30 - 31/10 (SAT - SUN) 2PM

Choreography: Ivy Tsui
Performance: Ching Chu
Live Music & Performance: Felix Lok

A fish looking at itself in a petal
Finds a city with its roots nowhere to be seen.
People covering faces of their own and the gods
Keep the party going as if everything remains serene.

The fish looking at itself in a petal
Finds its belly turned upside down,
And the sky, as well, turned upside down.
Water ripples in a fantastic pattern of fish scales,
While waves show no emotional ups nor downs.

The fish looking at itself in a petal 
Utters words that are incomplete.
Gazing at the reflections underwater,
It finds its other half lying in the rice cooker with douchi and garlic.

Under the cover of turbulences along the streets,
It disguises itself as a human and slips into a shoal of fishes.
Forgetting that it cannot be seen by dandelions,
Into the reality it sinks and vanishes.

With hints from the literary works of Hong Kong authors and video installations of artist Hung Keung, we keep contemplating how the Chinese language affects us, the native Chinese speakers, in terms of our interpretation, expression and imagination of body, sound, meaning and space.

Walk

30 - 31/10 (SAT - SUN) 2:30PM

Choreography & Performance: Li Tuokun

We stop and go, and have a look here and there, wishing to walk around and explore unlimited potentials in the limited space. It is not that I am where home is, but instead, home is where I am. A table may not be big, but it is already my whole world. It is supporting me, while I am also carrying it.

Slow

30 - 31/10 (SAT - SUN) 3PM

Choreography and Performance: KT Yau
Performance: Poon Tai-ming

 “SLOW” (慢駛), a warning and safety sign on roads written in Chinese and English with the specific typeface, is one of the signature features of Hong Kong. On every road, there is always enough space for writing these characters in an enormous size―we should perhaps be thankful that this city is not that crowded.

“Slow” is never a suitable adjective for Hong Kong people, while during these years, we have little choice but to slow down.