Garden of Forking Dreams

Wong King-fai x Mui Cheuk-yin

Garden of Forking Dreams

Garden of Forking Dreams is adapted from the eponymous literary classic by literary giant, Pai Hsien-yung. The emotion of literature is infused with a refreshing new taste through the unique choreography and performance by Mui Cheuk-yin. Using old buildings of Hong Kong as the backdrop, director Wong King-fai conveys a distinctive Hong Kong sentiment through his own film language, weaving together an aesthetics from action, music, narration, time and space, assisted by a professional photography team. The project also includes a screening and a post-viewing talk, which invites the public to rethink Hong Kong’s culture, history and aesthetics.

Wong King-fai x Mui Cheuk-yin

Mui Cheuk-yin is an internationally renowned solo artist and dance ambassador of Hong Kong. She has earned four Hong Kong Dance Awards and the Distinguished Achievement Award (2012) presented by the Hong Kong Dance. Mui has been invited to many international arts festivals including Re:Orient Dance Festival in London (1995), Venice Biennial Dance Festival (1999) and the Dance Biennale Tokyo (2002) among others.

Dr. Wong King-fai is an award-winning film director, screenwriter, and novelist. He is the director of two documentaries 1918 and Boundary, which are about Hong Kong literary giants Liu Yichang and Leung Ping-kwan respectively. His script, Life without Principle, won the Best Original Script Award at Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and it made the competition list at the Venice Film Festival. Wong was the recipient of the Artist of the Year Award by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2018.

Dancing Through Hong Kong’s Consciousness Amidst Colonial Buildings

Sparrows that used to gather in the courts of Wang and Xie, now scattered around commoners’ houses.

Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream is preeminent writer Pai Hsien-yung’s stream-of-consciousness novel, discerning the passage of time and reminiscing the bygone days. In choreographer Mui Cheuk-yin’s reinterpretation, she makes use of cheongsam and folding fans, which are full of traditional oriental beauty, while embracing the minimalism of Western modern dance. It is a work illustrating Hong Kong’s fusion of Eastern and Western culture. Director Wong King-fai is skilled in doing artistic experiments with literature and films. He has specially chosen Hong Kong’s old colonial buildings as the backdrop to evince the city’s flavours in Mui’s modern dance. Travelling between the quaint and present, the eras and history, this work adds possible interpretations in geo-localism.

Wong and Mui collaborate again in this work, where moving images and dance are intertwined, to focus on exploring the dancer’s movements. The work examines how the dancer transcends the relationship between old building spaces and the stream of consciousness to obtain a distinctive essence of Hong Kong dance videos. It is unclear whether past memories belong to personal life or local history. Is the illusory images a symbol, an imagery or just a dream?

【Project has completed】