Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs

Para Site is pleased to present Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs, an exhibition that refocuses on Ha’s printmaking practice on the occasion of Ha’s 100th birth anniversary.

"Motherboard" is the term Hong Kong-based artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009) coined for his collagraph plates. Unlike computer motherboards, Ha’s creations are decidedly analogue. They are assembled from wood and other found material through a highly labour-intensive process. Throughout his life, Ha created over 100 motherboards and kept them away from public view. He used these motherboards to produce over 3,000 editioned collagraphs mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.

Reframing Strangeness stages a selection of Ha’s motherboards, collagraphs and gouache drawings. On these surfaces, otherworldly creatures hover mid-air and ancient Chinese oracle bone scripts are combined with modern Chinese traditional characters and letters from the Roman alphabet. In the exhibition, the motherboards are placed next to their "offspring" collagraphs and "parallel" drawings to offer a re-reading of Ha’s interconnected art practice. 

In the mid-20th century, Hong Kong was on the brink of significant economic and societal transformation. During this time, the surfaces of motherboards became an arena for Ha to explore a unique modernist visual vocabulary while also nurturing his passion for obsessive record-keeping of all kinds. Reframing Strangeness encourages viewers to examine Ha’s motherboards as aesthetic objects. It invites them to contemplate the artist’s distinctive relationship to materials circulating in the region then, which was a key part of Ha’s art-making process.

The exhibition can also be considered as another interpretative engagement with Ha’s expansive practice by various practitioners, including the Jogjakarta-based research group Hyphen—, London-based publisher Afterall and Hong Kong-based artist Kensa Hung. In addition to showcasing his work, the exhibition will foster further discussion through a series of public programmes, including podcasts and workshops. These initiatives aim to explore intergenerational conversations on remembrance, conservation, and the reproduction and manipulation of materials, extending the discourse surrounding Ha’s practice from the city to the world beyond.

Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs is curated by Michelle Wun Ting Wong and is developed from a chapter of her doctoral thesis on the life and work of Ha Bik Chuen.

Major support for this exhibition is generously provided by Virginia Sun Yee. Additional support is provided by the Supporters’ Circle, including Jean-Marc Bottazzi, Brady Ng, Rossi & Rossi, and Yuri van der Leest.