Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs
Para Site, Hong Kong

“Reframing Strangeness” at Para Site was modest, unassuming, yet quietly historic—the first comprehensive survey of the singular printmaking practice of the late Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009). Born in Xinhui, Guangdong, Ha settled in Hong Kong in 1957 and became known for his ubiquitous presence at—and, from the 1980s onward, his meticulous, bordering-on-obsessive photo documentation of—art exhibitions and events. His extensive photographic materials, along with his encyclopedic collection of exhibition pamphlets, art magazines, periodicals, and collaged scrapbooks, have been posthumously digitized and placed in M+, the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the University of Hong Kong. For the past decade, research and exhibition efforts have concentrated on the Ha Bik Chuen Archive, while the cataloguing of Ha’s own artworks in his studio, which he kept largely private during his life, remain ongoing. The endeavor recently unearthed over 100 previously unseen original collagraph plates from the 1970s to ‘90s—a discovery that shifted the focus from Ha Bik Chuen the documentarian to Ha Bik Chuen the artist.