How artist has turned forgotten Hong Kong novels into new digital art and online experiences
- Hung Keung’s ‘It All Begins With a Word’ project, with animation, video and interactive games, re-examines old stories and poems at ReNew Vision
- Work of five local and international new media creatives feature on this month’s New Vision Art Festival’s transitional online platform amid Covid-19 outbreak
Literature has long inspired other art forms. Nineteenth-century painter Sir John Everett Millais famously depicted, on canvas, the tragic death of Shakespearean character Ophelia, in Hamlet, in his eponymous painting.
Many of the longest running Broadway shows such as The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked and Les Miserables were all inspired by literary classics.
In 2010, a “sculptural” book called Tree of Codes was published, created by bestselling American author Jonathan Safran Foer, who cut up his “favourite book” by Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles from 1934, and removed words from it to carve out a new story.
Foer’s work was subsequently adopted by contemporary British choreographer Wayne McGregor to create an immersive, free-form balletic performance of the same name.
Imagination and creativity beyond words
