“On Your Seat, On Your Mind” Art Project | Hong Kong

A seat does more than fulfill a functional purpose; it also carries the aesthetics of its time, presenting the concepts of its creator and accumulating the memories of its users.

As the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) unveiled its new look in 2019, it also re-examined the relationship between art, the contemporary zeitgeist, and the urban city. The leading art institution united local artists, designers, and architects for a public bench project called "On Your Seat, On Your Mind" – which aimed to connect different spaces in the museum and bring visitors closer to art.

In the renovated lobby,  onebite has designed a bench made of concrete blocks, wood, and stainless steel. They are called 'Old and New' as a tribute to the museum's architectural transformation.  For this set of chairs, onebite collaborated with the local art collective ‘moldflip’, which specialised in cement as a creative medium. We also led a public workshop in which bricks from the museum's old walls were broken up and mixed with new cement, hence preserving traces of history while upcycling construction materials.  In addition to the materials, the design of the chairs also took reference from the museum's exterior wall, which has changed from a vertically aligned facade to a horizontally aligned three-dimensional form. The recessed profile of the benches echoed the design of HKMoA’s new exterior wall design.

Apart from working with artists like Ray Chan and Margaret Chu to incorporate their artwork and design intents to create unique benches, we also designed a temporary exhibition space for the benches on the fifth-level attic, which was designed conscientiously using sustainable materials such as pegboards and reusable materials which could be recycled after the exhibition. As visitors walk through the gallery and sit on one of these newly designed benches, onebite hopes they too could be inspired by the different stories and appreciate how art can integrate with daily life.

A series of engagement workshops and events were curated from May 2019 to January 2020, stories from the participants/public were collected in different ways and some of the work were integrated into the seat design as a way to inject intimate memories and poetic reflections into the museum public space. The entire co-creation process is presented in the Attic to let visitors "on their seats" learn about the stories carried by each set of the seating, and at the same time appreciate how art can integrate with daily life.