From Photography to Music: a Creative Dialogue between David Clarke and Chan Hing-yan
Date: 13 Nov - 1 Dec 2013
This exhibition consists of a series of photographic images depicting flowers and fruit. Photographer David Clarke originally generated these pictures using Polaroid instant film, with the resultant images then being scanned at high resolution and printed at a larger scale as giclée (high quality ink-jet) prints on a suitable artist paper. No digital manipulation took place after scanning - the images that were printed were simply records of the impact on film chemicals of whatever light was allowed through the lens during exposure. These photographs are all receiving their first public showing now, at a point in time when the visual world of Polaroid instant film has disappeared definitively into the past.
The photos are being presented here as part of a creative dialogue with the composer Chan Hing-yan, who has produced a new musical composition entitled Adieu Sequence in response to this body of works. Since the works themselves were produced by a migration from one medium to another (Polaroid film to digital print) they were already open to the idea that creativity might come from the shift between mediums, and thus were ready for an engagement of this kind, but of course a shift from photography to musical sound is an altogether more radical jump, and exciting for that very reason. Drawing on Clarke's images as a point of departure, Chan endows his Adieu Sequence with delicate sonic fragments and bids a musical farewell to a vanishing medium.
-University Museum and Art Gallery of The University of Hong Kong