Jess Lau Ching-wa (left)

Graduate, School of Creative Media
Participant, Extreme Environments programme

Sunny Wong Ho-yin (right)

Graduate, College of Science
Participant, Extreme Environments programme

“We hope to raise environmental awareness through our Antarctica artwork.”

Refreshing Antarctica air inspired the team to raise awareness of air pollution.

The team used lasers to measure air quality.

Jess Lau and Sunny Wong’s artwork ‘The Veils We Breathe’.

Jess from the School of Creative Media and Sunny from the College of Science leapt at the opportunity to join the Extreme Environments programme at CityUHK. They were both hugely excited: they would have the opportunity to use environmental data collected from the world’s most southerly continent to create new artworks in teams from across the academic spectrum.

The purity of Antarctica’s air was genuinely refreshing to participants on the programme, especially Jess and Sunny, who had grown up in Hong Kong’s metropolitan cityscape filled with tower blocks and affected by air pollution like so many cities today. They wanted to produce art that would move beyond remote indexes, stats and data often presented to explain air quality and instead generate more tangible physical representations of air pollution to raise public awareness more effectively.

They used lasers to measure air quality at multiple sites in Antarctica and Hong Kong and used light detectors to collect the data. Light intensity reveals the quality of the air that we breath because pollutants around us impact the laser beams. Jess and Sunny then created “The Veils We Breathe”, using the collected data, transforming an invisible problem into a moody, poetic installation that presented a new perspective on air quality.

Their installation recreated the light detector’s readings from the two sites using layers of translucent fabric to reveal pollution density. An array of lights on the ceiling where the installation was exhibited simulated the sun’s passing over Hong Kong; a circle of lights on the floor mimicked the sun’s path over Antarctica. As the light passed through the vertically stacked layers of fabric, viewers can see a visual comparison between the air quality found in Hong Kong and Antarctica.

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