M+ Announces Recipients of M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2018

M+ at West Kowloon Cultural District and Design Trust are pleased to announce that Hugh Davies and the team of Fan Lok Yi and Sampson Wong are the recipients of the M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2018.
 

Now in its fourth year, the M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship aims to support high-level research related to design and architecture history and contemporary issues, focusing on Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region, and their relationship with the rest of the world.
 

An interdisciplinary artist, educator, and investigator, Hugh Davies will examine the city’s character, architecture, and urban design as represented in popular videogames. Davies will survey Hong Kong’s representation in a multiplicity of videogame experiences over the past 30 years and explore the city in its varying incarnations, unearthing the correspondence between the actual and virtual. He will consider the city through different overlapping areas of design disciplines.
 

Concurrently, the team of Fan Lok Yi and Sampson Wong will investigate the movement of constructing ‘revolutionary playgrounds’ during the 1960s and 1970s in Hong Kong, predominantly focusing on the Shek Lei playground and its extended context in East Asia. The research seeks to join the broader dialogue concerning how architectural practice and discourse were received in East Asia and Hong Kong during the said period.
 

M+ / Design Trust Research Fellows are selected by a jury consisting of M+ and Design Trust representatives, based on the strength of their topic proposals and the applicants’ potential to significantly contribute to bodies of knowledge relating to design and architecture in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region. Recipients spend up to six months attached to M+, at the end of which they produce a paper that will be delivered at a public talk. The previous Fellows are Ling Fan (2015); Joseph Grima and the team of Daniel Cooper and Juliana Kei (2016); and Thomas Daniell (2017).
 

Remarks
 

About Hugh Davies
Hugh Davies is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and investigator. His research explores technology histories, screen practices, and expansive games. Davies has held numerous leadership roles in the Australian arts / technology sector including Senior Lecturer in Media at La Trobe University, Board Chair of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and Board Chair of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. He is currently an Asialink resident at Tokyo Wondersite, researching games and play in Japanese art and society. Davies was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Monash University, Australia in 2014 and he publishes and speaks on digital culture, contemporary art, and mixed reality games.
 

About Fan Lok Yi and Sampson Wong
Fan Lok Yi is a curator and artist based in Hong Kong. Fascinated by untamed urban nature, unintended use of space, and other accidental poetics in the grand scheme of things, she works to reveal the connections between urban space, history, and the environment through research and collaborative artistic processes. She is the Curator of Make A Difference Institute and has curated projects including Kwai Tsing Daily @ West Kowloon (2016–2017), Affordable Art Basel! (2014–2015), and Tin Shui Wai Topology (2014). Fan received her Master of Arts degree in Fine Art from University of the Arts London and Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Hong Kong.
 

Sampson Wong is a Hong Kong-based artist, independent curator, and academic. His research and creative interests include urban theory and contemporary urbanism, socially-engaged art, art and the public sphere, creative activism, Hong Kong studies, and urban nature. He has co-founded the Hong Kong Urban Laboratory, the artist collective Add Oil Team, and co-curated the Emptyscape Art Festival (a triennial) with the curatorial collective Emptyscape. Wong is currently a Lecturer at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Geography from the University Manchester, a Master of Science degree in Modernity, Space, and Place from University College London, and was trained in political science and political philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
 

About M+
Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture—encompassing 20th and 21st century visual art, design and architecture, and moving image from Hong Kong, China, Asia, and beyond—M+ will be one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. Located adjacent to the Art Park on the waterfront, the museum building designed by Herzog & de Meuron is scheduled to complete in 2019.
 

About West Kowloon Cultural District
Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces, and M+, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, as well as provide 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.