Point Line Mean

As a collaborative project, Point Line Mean situated itself in a unique position by bringing deaf artists and hearing artists to work together. The overarching question was – how do we reach a shared understanding when our means of communication rarely intersect? Gathered by a Linguist Arthur Thompson (a.k.a. Art Hur) specializing in Hong Kong Sign Language studies, two deaf artists – KWKIKI and Nora Fong Bao – and two hearing artists – Toi-Yee Doris Ng and Sharu Binnong Sikdar – were paired up to explore different dimensions of communication for a year and delved into developing their own language.

The inaugural exhibition Point Line Mean [點·線/意!] aimed to showcase the first outcomes of the inquiry and collaboration.

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Upon gearing up for the exhibition, the artists and I reached a consensus that it was the first round of output demonstrating how art as a means bridged the two different worlds based on different channels of communication before probing further. While the exhibition presented four artifacts ranging from performance to installation, painting, drawing, and video, two workshops led by the deaf artists and a documentary screening on CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) were carried out to explicitly bring the deaf community and the hearing community in contact. As such, the main aims of the exhibition were to assemble different dimensions of communicative experience and to make it specifically accessible to both the deaf and the hearing audience. This is evident in the exhibition itself, the social media feeds, and the exhibition leaflet design. Not only were English, Chinese, and Hong Kong Sign Language equally represented throughout, but the “must-fold-to decipher” design of the leaflet invited the audience to pay a bit of effort to step closer to the place tuning into the other communication channel.