Charles Kwong: Lifelike I. 栩栩如生．一
With concept and music by Charles Kwong, site-specific work “Lifelike” is part of “Hi! Flora, Fauna” art project organised by the Art Promotion Office. The Macao-based architect duo Impromptu Projects has been specially commissioned to design in the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens large-scale installations that resemble a “garden within a garden” built by bamboo scaffolding, with structures and forms echoing the woods in the garden.
Originally planned to take place in December and February, the first two performances of “Lifelike” have been cancelled due to the pandemic. The creative team has worked on two film versions of the work, and we are excited to share part one with you!
LIFELIKE - When Zoo Becomes a Metaphor
Charles Kwong
To imitate nature, to abstract from nature, and to empathise nature, are an eternal subject in music. From High Mountains and Flowing Water to The Distant Call of the Deers and from The Four Seasons to Pastoral, none of the musical creations at all times and from all backgrounds intended to faithfully present the sounds of nature. Instead, taking nature as inspiration, musicians exercise their imagination to transform it, reducing it into a symbolic or metaphorical presence in their music— musical sounds symbolise natural phenomena, whereas nature is used as a metaphor for the infinite developments in musical movements.
To present nature in music, and to present music in nature—Lifelike is a series of site-specific musical compositions that build on the concept of “learning from nature” and weave music into the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens. Nonetheless, the theme is not nature in general but one with a unique existence within “gardens”. This kind of nature displayed in gardens, parks and zoos is man-made and manipulated. Both active and static lives in these settings are plucked from their habitats to live and be managed in confined areas. This form of existence is a distorted state of nature, humans taming nature, as well as their attempts to understand and preserve nature.
Lifelike mimics and responds to all the sounds in the gardens. It derives from the sounds in nature, but even more so from the order created in the gardens, an institutionalised space. As the piece removes music performance from the music hall setting to a park, how the spatial construction in the gardens recreates the relationships between the life forms and the natural system becomes an important experiential aspect besides sounds. The architect duo Impromptu Projects has been specially commissioned to design in the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens large-scale installations that resemble a “garden within a garden” built by bamboo scaffolding. The structures and forms echo the woods in the garden while further dividing the space within the garden. During the performance of Lifelike, musicians and audience roving or pausing in the “garden within a garden” are separated by bamboo scaffolds which act as both cages and stages. Taking place among these abstract woods, cages and stages, the music performance establishes a situation with spectators and spectacles, as well as the relationship between them. However, the fluidity and openness of the work blur the line between the two roles, as the music develop according to the musicians’ observation of the surroundings—the audience and the musicians are thus both the spectators and the spectacles.
Through music performance, Lifelike contextualises the situation of an artificialised and institutionalised nature , in order to explore what John Berger was referring to by “zoo as a metaphor”. When a performance takes place in a zoo, who is the spectator and who is the spectacle? When visitors, as bystanders, marvel at exotic beings in a zoo, do they also become a part of the system and order created for the site? Are the cages, where animals are kept in and displayed as rare treasures, also auditoriums for the animals to watch the show at the other end? As visitors anticipate another intriguing move from across the cage, do the crated animals have any anticipations for the other side? Are the lives on the two sides of a cage equal?
“Learning from nature”, Lifelike is not to be an acoustic verisimilitude, but to present the existence and state of the beings in the gardens, in the form of music performance.
When a zoo becomes a lifelike metaphor, what does this metaphor refer to?
http://lifelike.hk
![Charles Kwong — Imaginary beings 2 [w/ score]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fdNcf9DqQSI/maxresdefault.jpg)
