The Lost Time Travel Machine features vibrant sculptures made with plastic toys and stationery by Hong Kong artist Angela Yuen that capture lively scenes of old Hong Kong.
Contemporary by Angela Li presents The Lost Time Travel Machine, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong artist Angela Yuen. With a long fascination of all things local and nostalgic, Yuen uses plastic toys, old-fashioned stationery and other quintessential Hong Kong objects to create playful 3D sculptures and installations that resemble Hong Kong’s skyline and street scenes.
Yuen explores the elements that represent Hong Kong’s history and culture, such as ice-cream motorcycles, street vendors, trams, rickshaws, sampan boats and the now-demolished Queen’s Pier. Strategically placed lights in the sculptures transform objects into imaginative silhouettes and stories; every object is carefully choreographed, combining cast coloured shadows to produce unexpected, stunning visual results. Like still frames from old Hong Kong movies, her works bring audiences to a parallel dimension, where some of the faded local cultural elements and currently significant urban characters of today coexist.
Angela Yuen was born in Hong Kong in 1991 and graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University in 2014. She participated in a Beijing artist residency program in 2016 and the Hart Haus residency in Hong Kong in 2019, and is a finalist of the 2019 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The Lost Time Travel Machine is Yuen’s first major solo exhibition, and her works have been included in many joint exhibitions, public and private collections in Hong Kong, China and Australia since 2013.
