A Dialogue with (Rain) Water: Hong Kong 一 場與（雨）水的對話：香港篇

2023 Howland Travel Fellowship exhibition
FRI, apr 5 – WED, Apr 24, 2024

GALLERY TALK & RECEPTION 
MON, APR 15, 2024
5PM
CAMPBELL CORNER GALLERY & NAUG LOUNGE 

Growing up in Hong Kong, Joyce Fong and Celina Qiu, UVA landscape architecture graduate students and 2023 Howland Travel Fellows, witnessed a perceptual shift in people's attitudes towards (rain)water that contributed to changes in the city's public policies and the engineered landscape. From severe droughts and water rationing in the 1960s, to the construction of a massive water infrastructure network in the 1970s, present-day Hong Kong residents live without a concern of water scarcity and increasingly face the dangers of flooding and torrential rains.
 
For their project, A Dialogue with (Rain) Water: Hong Kong 一 場與（雨）水的對話：香港篇, Fong and Qiu document and reimagine moments of interaction between people, water infrastructures and (rain)water along the MacLehose Trail, a 100 km hike that stretches across Hong Kong’s varied regional terrain. Initially serving as water catchment grounds with infrastructure to control water, the astonishing topography is now a popular recreational hiking trail passing through multiple country parks and campsites. Showcasing fieldwork and research, this project hopes to provide a different lens for encountering and engaging with (rain)water. 

Bios

Joyce Fong is a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia. She sees herself not as a typical landscape designer, but as a "landscape translator" - to bridge community with their landscape through design. She is passionate about exploring the outdoors and experimenting with various media to represent and convey the language of the landscape. Valuing both nature and human, she is seeking creative ways to establish reciprocal relationships through landscape design in which we co-create with nature. She is also interested in topics of environmental justice, responsive environmental design, and landscape resiliency.

Celina Qiu is a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia and holds dual citizenship between Hong Kong and Canada. Living extensively in cities, she is fascinated with understanding the urban condition and how to design for its quality of life, environmental resilience and varied cultural identities. She loves to hike and explore the wilder sides of places whilst understanding its layered history, knowledge systems and cultural practices that emerge from it. Curiously driven and with a meticulous attention to detail, she hopes to create drawings that are aesthetically impactful and ethnographically insightful.
 

Supported by the Benjamin C. Howland endowment.