Cave Whispers: An Online Multimedia Bilingual Exhibition of Poetry

Chris Song

Cave Whispers: An Online Multimedia Bilingual Exhibition of Poetry

The Cave Whispers project is an online bilingual multimedia exhibition of poetry that features dialogues, polyphonies, and events among poetry, photography, and sound. Poet Mary Wong, photographer Yuen Chi-him, and musician Hippocrates Cheng respond not only to each other’s works through collaboration, they also voice out their dialogic responses to history, society, the pandemic and everyday life. The trio contributes a unique spectrum of collaborations, seeking spiritual recovery from the despair of pandemic through meditating on the presented words, images, and sounds, which resonate with various types of imagination, colour and sonority on different media. Curated and designed by Chris Song, the online exhibition will feature 26 multimedia collaborations consisting of poems, photographs, and sounds (including music, voices of the poet and the translators, and electronics).

Chris Song

A poet, translator and editor based in Hong Kong. He has published four collections of poetry and many volumes of poetry in translation. Song received an “Extraordinary Mention” at Italy’s UNESCO-recognized Nosside World Poetry Prize 2013. He won the Young Artist Award at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Haizi Poetry Award in 2019. Song is now Executive Director of the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights and Editor-in-Chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He also serves as an Arts Advisor to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the International Writers’ Workshop at the Hong Kong Baptist University.

The Audio-Visual Poetry of a Multifarious Hong Kong

Cave Whispers is an online exhibition of poems, images and sounds.

Poet Mary Wong Shuk-han writes about the everyday and society. Her verses present a Hong Kong that seems both stricken and robust, urban and green, dead and alive.

Photographer Yuen Chi-him’s images juxtapose quiet groves with the crowded city. The liveliness and quietude in his images of urban and natural landscapes reflect our resistance to the pandemic abnormalities.

Composer Hippocrates Cheng Ching-nam fuses his thoughts about life, society and world into sounds. Just like his pandemic virtual opera In the Midst of…, his works continue to stir up our hearts amid mundane hardship.

Wong and Yuen’s collaborative works that combine poetry and photography have matured over the years. Cheng also has rich experience in collaborating with many poets of Hong Kong. The trio’s dynamic dialogues of poems, images and sounds express a conviction of beating the stagnant reality.

Web designer, Keith Liu, is a poet in his own right. He has created the Verse of Verse poetry website and is adept at virtualising collaborative works of different art sectors in virtual space, especially when poetry is involved.

Curating this project, Chris Song sees a universe in a line of verse, a world in a whisper.

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