Connecting people through art 

We are glad to announce the presentation of 47 Days, Sound-less by Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi, at M+, Hong Kong, as part of Shanshui: Echoes and Signals, a new exhibition reimagining landscape through works from the M+ Collections, on view from Saturday 3 February, in the South Galleries of the museum.

Drawn from the M+ Collections, this exhibition explores the complex connections between landscape and humanity in our post-industrial and increasingly virtual world. Rotating displays will periodically renew the dialogues among the works and with the natural and urban environments beyond the museum itself.

Commonly translated as ‘landscape’, shanshui means literally ‘mountain and water’. Encompassing more than observable reality, the term refers to a cultural legacy integral to Chinese philosophical thinking and poetic imagination that has motivated a millennium-long tradition of ink painting across East Asia. Building on this legacy, Shanshui: Echoes and Signals reimagines landscape and our relationship to it through visual art, moving image, sound, design and architecture, and explores resonances not only between different genres and mediums but also between space and time, vision and imagination, fleeting experience and persistent history.

47 Days, Sound-less by Nguyen Trinh Thi is a film about small sounds in a morning forest. Weaving together sound samples and footage of natural landscapes from Hollywood and Vietnamese films, Nguyen Trinh Thi foregrounds subjects that typically serve as backdrops, extras, or stand-ins in mainstream films, and incorporates words inspired by and taken from science fiction. The work explores the potential of listening as a way of knowing that is not human-centric and more attuned to nature. It uses strong contrast between light and dark and between sound and silence to destabilise the persistent power relations in postcolonial Vietnam.

47 Days, Sound-less is co-presented by the Han Nefkens Foundation and M+, and is commissioned by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong and Singapore Art Museum. Nguyen is the inaugural winner of the ‘The Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+, Hong Kong, and Singapore Art Museum—Moving Image Commission 2021’. The commission aims to support contemporary artistic production within the field of moving image and is directed at artists of Asian origin, nationality or living in Asia.

About the Han Nefkens Foundation
The Han Nefkens Foundation is a private, non-profit organisation set up in Barcelona in 2009 by Dutch writer and patron, Han Nefkens. It focuses on the production of video art, with the aim of connecting people through art across the world, collaborating with renowned international art institutions. The Foundation’s founding values have defined it from the beginning as an innovative and forward-thinking model: a production hub that oversees and promotes contemporary creation from the very first moments until the final presentation. Positioned as a platform for video artists to advance their careers, its main activity is to commission new works through its awards and grants on an international level.

The unique way in which the foundation operates allows for artists not only to produce new work but also to have that work shown at numerous art institutions world-wide.
https://www.hnfoundation.com 

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.