Oil Street Art Space is housed in a heritage building and former clubhouse of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. It sits on what was the beach at the North Point waterfront. The land was reclaimed in the 1930s, but Choi Sai Ho, multimedia artist and composer, pulls the shoreline back in his installation Hush. On an LED screen spanning the floor of one the galleries, the tide hypnotically tos and fros, while gulls swarm across the walls, all to the reverberating sound of waves crashing and wings flapping.
In a small connecting room, Choi’s second installation, Rush, is the antithesis. Projected throughout this small space – walls, floor, ceiling – is a virtual, immersive journey through the metropolis of Hong Kong. You are digitally propelled through the streets of Kowloon and across the harbour to Hong Kong Island. Weaving amongst the skyscrapers before zooming up to the sky, the perspective twists and turns from all angles, with the hum of traffic filling your ears. City life is condensed into a dystopian video game with no off switch, played on an endless loop.
Choi’s installations capture Hong Kong’s dichotomies – nature, tides, and shorelines, alongside infrastructure, technology, and a rapid pace of life. The representation of both the natural landscape together with the urbanism of Hong Kong, also echoes to the geographical history of where these installations are displayed – a seashore transformed into a buzzing city street.
