Mass Transit Railway

As the summer heat starts to get unreasonable, we invite you to cool off at our next exhibition - ‘Mass Transit Railway’ is a new installation by Sing Jantzen Tse that transforms mundane objects related to transportation, public streets, and recreational parks, employing a multi-screen and sound playback composite construction to evoke a feeling of sensory overload with a blend of humour and self-deprecation. Juxtaposing public and personal space; interior and exterior, the video installation explores the social aspects of image production and consumption in our daily lives.

Tse's audio-visual installation is not merely a documentation of the changing cityscape, but a psychogeography of Hong Kong. Combining footage captured during the pandemic with snippets of childhood memories recorded on VHS, Tse merges nostalgia with a fresh perspective on the familiar cityscape. Influenced by the aesthetic language of 90s TV advertisements that promoted Hong Kong as an 'East meets West' travel destination, Tse also draws inspiration from the surge of tourists from mainland China after the SARS outbreak. This influx of tourism brought cultural clashes and differing attitudes towards etiquette, particularly in public transportation.

Just as the MTR often became the site of happenings, this exhibition proposes to do the same - the installation will become a container and enabler of activations by other artists and performers throughout the two months, so keep your eyes peeled on our updates on Instagram! If the installation inspires any ideas for activation, we also welcome you to share your ideas with us.

Sing Jantzen Tse’s (b.1987) creates audio-visual works that consider the relations of people, language and city landscapes.In his videos, which are often presented together in his installations, he attempts to express the inseparable and entangled relationships between people and cities, the soul and time. Interested in multimedia practices, he works with mixed media with a focus on audio-visual moving images. In 2012, his experimental sound work Language toured various theatrical performance programmes in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei. Between 2011 to 2015, he was invited as a resident artist touring Africa, India, and the United Kingdom. In 2017, he co-founded the art group “Dabinlo Lab”, which focuses on video projects, sound and music performance, and multimedia art production focusing on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). As a musician he is active in band shows and has composed and improvised music for multimedia theatre performances. He has also led sound and video workshops for local institutions. Sing Jantzen Tse received his Master of Fine Art at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and has been supported by soundpocket’s Artist Support Programme 2011–12.