The fragmentation of urban space, degeneration of cultural diversity and other homogenising and oversimplifying trends make “Freedom” a luxury in the city. When the city is viewed as a reflection of irrational prosperity, arbitrary judgment, and insulation of opportunity, then it becomes a stage for an alternative show.
Central in Hong Kong is commercial space ‘in extremis’ - an urban fabric etched by enormous capital flows. It is gradually being shaped into an isolated urban island, lacking any human scale or diversity of use. Ironically this area is the ‘pin-up’ image most used to represent the city.
"We are now all in Central – Sustainable capsule as the infrastructure of urban representation" was the theme of OVAL's exhibition for the HK biennale in 2008. The Capsule, as an individual identity, representing the infrastructure and materialised module for the agenda of socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable development. The process of representation, through individual and collective expression by occupying, anchoring, sharing, mutating, flowing, performing, merging, altogether indicates the conflicts and dialogues between the states of centralisation and decentralisation, fragmentation and integration, monopolisation and competition, desperation and opportunities, memories and urban amnesia, superiority and lowliness, prosperity and dilapidation. This temporal urban infrastructure, represented through collective consciousness, can thus be employed to rejoin the gap and re-fabricate the differential in the society both geographically and metaphysically.
