Launch of an online archive about Hong Kong art ecology

Initiated by artist Lee Kai Chung and researcher Shen Jun, stepbackforward.art is a collective art project that gathers the fragments of emerging artists’ archives and ideas scattered in the public domain, and gradually generates a bottom-up online archives reacting to Hong Kong art ecology under severe impact of social changes and global pandemics. In the first phase of the project, SBF invited emerging artists and interdisciplinary cultural practitioners who regard Hong Kong as “home,” generating artist archives and methodologies through questionnaires, dialogues and interviews.

Rather than categorizing artists by works and subject matters, SBF cares more about how emerging artists develop relatively sustainable practice in an imperfect social situation and art mechanism, embracing the perceptions and reflections of the moment and transforming them into visual, audio and text-based records. The web archive is designed as an interface that randomly retrieves keywords and archival fragments of all participating artists in real time. Once entering the website, the users are greeted by a cloud of archives and multimedia fragments that are collectively contributed, as if you are navigating a world of ideas that will not be silenced.

The second phase of the project will continue on a long-term basis and emerging art practitioners from different regions and backgrounds are welcomed. (PR)


Email: stepbackforward@gmail.com
Facebook: @stepbackforward.art
Instagram: @stepbackforward
WeChat: stepbackforward