Two years ago, Phoebe Hui visited Audemars Piguet's headquarters in Le Brassus in Vallée de Joux, nestled in the Swiss Jura Mountains.
During an evening walk in the village, she was struck by the moonlight's pronounced reflection off the snowy slopes. Inspired by her experience on that full moon night, the multidisciplinary artist began researching the celestial body after she returned to Hong Kong.
Her site-specific installation, The Moon Is Leaving Us, is the fifth Audemars Piguet Art Commission and was unveiled last Sunday at Tai Kwun, Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong.
Since 2012, Audemars Piguet has nurtured exchanges with artists around the world. Like the brand's mechanical watches, commissioned artworks are about more than what you see.
Guest curator Ying Kwok and multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Hui working on the Moon-inspired installation.
Hui together with guest curator Ying Kwok developed the large-scale installation whose name reflects on how the Moon is slowly migrating away from Earth at 3.78cm per year, the same speed it takes for our fingernails to grow.
Realising this impact will not be seen in our lifetimes but she explored visible and invisible aspects of the Earth's only natural satellite.
(Main picture) Selenite mechanical kinetic robot has 48 arms, each with a fragmented image of the Moon projected on a screen.
Hui primarily works on the relationship between language, sound and technology. Her recent projects increasingly rely on interdisciplinary ideas drawn from the philosophy of science, system aesthetics and the concept of indeterminacy.
Kwok is the newly appointed senior curator of Digital and Heritage at Tai Kwun, Centre for Heritage and Arts, where the installation is exhibited in the Duplex Studio until May 23.
The creation of Selenite shown in the Research Room.
Comprising two major artworks, Selenite and Selena, the multiroom installation explores historical and contemporary observations of the Moon in an effort to re-examine our relationship with it and embrace new perspectives on science through contemporary art.
Selena is Greek for Moon while Selenite refers to an insectoid lunar native from the scientific novel The First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells.
Hui's Selenite is a mechanical kinetic robot with 48 arms, arranged in a parabolic shape. Affixed to each arm, a screen projects a fragmented image of the Moon.
The screens are overlaid with polarisers, which only show a partial view of the lunar images, ranging from historic drawings to visuals from Nasa's and other online open-source data.
A team of engineers at Force Dimension, an innovator in high precision haptics technology, shared their knowledge and expertise with Hui throughout her mechanical programming of Selenite.
Selena draw-bot is programmed to produce one-of-a-kind ink drawings of the Moon's visible and invisible sides.
Likewise, Selena is a hand-built machine, programmed by Hui to produce one-of-a-kind ink drawings of the Moon's visible and invisible sides. It is displayed in the artist's Research Room along with objects used throughout the development of the installation.
Her research included investigating how the Moon has historically been represented, accessing online records including the first book to include a detailed map of the Moon, the 1647 edition of Selenographia, Sive Lunae Descriptio by astronomer Johannes Hevelius.
This, coupled with contemporary observations of the Moon, inspired the draw-bot Selena, which was built using re-appropriated fine art tools, including a canvas frame and parts from an easel.
While the intricacies of Selena's drawings are based on the latest open-source data from Nasa, the drawings are made to appear at the hand of Hevelius.
It takes five to seven days for Selena's computer to run its programme, which interprets 138 million parameters from each original Nasa image and an additional 12 to 14 hours to complete a single Moon drawing.
Due to Covid-19, The Moon Is Leaving Us is on view by invitation only but publicly accessible through a virtual exhibition tour and digital curator walk-throughs, via Audemars Piguet's website.
