Dancing in the moonlight with Phoebe Hui

Every year, when the Mid-Autumn Festival arrives in Hong Kong, children rush out to parade their colorful lanterns around the park, but when Phoebe Hui was growing up, she was too busy taking hers apart to join the throng. ‘When I was eight, I dissected one and tried to make a light show inside a Lego house,’ recalls the Hong Kong-based artist with a smile. ‘Technology is like magic around us…I was always curious about how things work and whether we have the possibility to rearrange it in a different way.’

The sense of wonder and curiosity that shaped Hui’s mind as a child now fuels her practice as an artist. After studying film editing and sound design as an undergraduate in Hong Kong, she completed a master’s degree in fine art at Central Saint Martins in London, followed by an MFA in design media art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she learned about computer coding and virtual reality. Over the years since, her works have ranged from a self-built piano made of wooden pencils to a computer-programmed gramophone, and have been shown both at art institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and research hubs like MIT Media Lab.

Late last month, Hui’s installation The Moon Is Leaving Us opened at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun – Centre for Heritage and Arts – the first Audemars Piguet Art Commission to be presented in Asia, and its fifth globally. Every two years, the Swiss luxury watchmaker’s art program, Audemars Piguet Contemporary, pairs a guest curator with an artist who is not yet internationally recognized, and supports the production of highly complex, large-scale artworks. For this project, Hui worked with Ying Kwok, who curated the Hong Kong presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s in-house curator Audrey Teichmann.

Inspiration for the artwork came while Hui was visiting the Audemars Piguet headquarters in Le Brassus, Switzerland, in 2019. One chilly night she dined at a remote mountain-side restaurant with the team, and while walking back after the meal, was struck by the reflection of the moonlight on the snowy slopes: ‘It was very quiet, we were close to nature…It was very dark but I didn’t feel scared.’ Later, when she learned that visitors would often trek up to the small restaurant just to see the full moon, this piqued her curiosity. She began researching the moon and soon discovered that the celestial body is actually moving away from us, which became the starting point for the work.

Stepping into the exhibition space at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong’s former police headquarters – whether physically or virtually – you are plunged into a dark tunnel and confronted with wall text stating that the moon is migrating away from the earth at a speed of 3.78 cm per year, approximately the same rate our fingernails grow. While this is a simple fact, it has a powerful impact. The prospect of losing the moon triggers a visceral reaction. Suddenly, you find yourself contemplating what a world without it would mean for you.

Moving deeper into the installation, in the first room you are dwarfed by a towering robot called Selenite, the only light source in the space. ‘The experience of time [here] may be a little different than before you enter the exhibition,’ says Hui, who wanted audience members to slow down and pause to observe the piece. The robot has 48 mechanical arms with a screen affixed to each one. Together, the screens form a large, satellite-shaped structure, the multiple arms calling to Hui’s mind a giant insect, so she named it Selenite, after the ‘Selenite people’ – the fictional, ant-like inhabitants who live on the moon in H.G. Wells’s science-fiction novel The First Men in the Moon.

Standing before Selenite, you see a single video that is fragmented as it plays on each of the screens, which are overlaid with small, moon-like filters called polarizers that occasionally, slowly move. The video is made up of what Hui calls ‘new moon’ images. She created it by intertwining about 150 images – spanning from 17th-century engravings of the moon to open-source images by Nasa – using a computer program written by her. The program also recognizes key parameters from these images and uses them to generate new visuals of the moon. By only allowing viewers to see snatches of the video, Hui points to the fragmented way we learn about the moon through selective information mediated by scientists, their instruments, and popular culture.

The idea of using polarizers came from one of Hui’s early experiments, during which she dismantled a computer monitor purely out of curiosity. ‘I realized that, actually, without a polarizer on the monitor, we can only see the bright LED light,’ she says. ‘I introduced the polarizer to the audience to highlight how we perceive a world that normally is invisible to us, and our relationship with this invisible world through instruments.’

To create Selenite, Hui worked with Force Dimension, a company based in Nyon, Switzerland, which specializes in haptic technology used in surgery and space exploration. ‘They told me that it was the most complex robot they had ever seen,’ Teichmann says, adding that Selenite uses a similar kind of technology to Nasa’s Mars rovers.

While Selenite is a response to contemporary research into the moon and imagery of it, Hui was also fascinated by early scientists who pointed their telescopes to the sky centuries ago. On the second floor of the installation, viewers encounter intricate ink drawings created by another robot she built, called Selena, named after the ancient Greek word for ‘moon.’ The drawings, based on open-source images from Nasa, show various perspectives of the moon, including the far side, which we cannot see, and an image showing the earth overlaid with the moon’s shadow. She used specific colors based on her conversations with a former astronaut and his video from space that revealed that the moon is actually much more colorful than we think.

At first glance, the drawings look like traditional etchings, but after closer inspection, you realize they are too perfect to have been done by hand. ‘You have the feeling it’s something very familiar, very traditional,  and then suddenly you realize it depends on extremely sophisticated [technology],’ says Teichmann, who explains that Hui is playing with ideas of representation in art and science.

The inspiration behind the ‘drawbot’ Selena actually came from another of Hui’s early experiments. ‘A couple of years ago I wanted to make my own printer but [one that uses] a pen,’ she says. Selena is a more complex iteration of this, made with reappropriated art tools, including a canvas frame and easel parts. It also has a jagged, 3D-printed interpretation of the moon’s landscape fixed on the surface like a shield. It takes five to seven days for Selena’s computer to run a special program, which interprets 138 million parameters from each of Nasa’s images, then a further 12 to 14 hours for it to complete a single drawing.

Hui programmed the robot to create the drawings in the style of the 17th-century Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius, a revolutionary figure in his field who was known for sketching the first detailed maps of the moon, and with whom Hui is fascinated. ‘Nowadays, using visual materials for serious subject matter and knowledge is something that is almost in our blood, but [during his time] it wasn’t. So I wanted to appreciate his contribution,’ she says, explaining that Hevelius’s approach to science was never fully understood by his peers.

The installation concludes with a room that evokes the artist’s studio and is filled with elements of her research materials and experiments from over the past two years. It’s a fitting end to the show, as Hui is still tinkering with the robots. ‘Selenite has the potential to move around, but I’m just thinking about whether I should let it dance or not,’ she says. ‘I know it sounds really crazy, but I really think of robots like human beings, like they have a “machine right.” I also didn’t want Selena to just be my slave and keep performing drawings…I want them to also have time to breathe and get used to the space.’ Hearing Hui personify her robot creations and speak about bestowing them with some dignity, she sounds like a modern-day Hevelius – a thinker who is far ahead of her time, encouraging us to catch up.

‘The 5th Audemars Piguet Art Commission, The Moon is Leaving Us by Phoebe Hui, is on view by invitation only due to COVID-19 from 25 April-23 May 2021 at Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong. You are invited to access the installation remotely, through a virtual exhibition tour and digital curator walk-throughs: https://www.audemarspiguet.com/com/en/news/art/phoebe-hui-the-moon-is-leaving-us.html’ 

Top image: Phoebe Hui in her studio. Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet.

The Audemars Piguet Art Commission is a biennial competition that offers a selected artist the opportunity to develop a large-scale original artwork, alongside an appointed guest curator and closely accompanied by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Established in 2012, Audemars Piguet Contemporary commissions international artists to create contemporary artworks, fostering a global community of creators