Afterall x Para Site, Reframing Strangeness with Michelle Wun Ting Wong

In collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong, as part of the exhibition ‘Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs’ (2025), Afterall have initiated a series of conversations with artists, curators and scholars. The exhibition reframes Ha’s motherboards from functional tools to aesthetic objects. We depart from Ha’s unconventional printing practice to generate new interpretations and intergenerational conversations, extending from Hong Kong to the world beyond.

Focused on Hong Kong-based artist Ha Bik Chuen’s printmaking practice, ‘Reframing Strangeness’ stages a selection of his ‘motherboards’: a term Ha coined to designate the printing plates he labouriously assembled from wood and other found materials to produce over 3,000 editioned collagraphs. In this first episode, Afterall editors Elisa Adami and Wing Chan talk to the exhibition’s curator Michelle Wun Ting Wong. We explore how the materials the motherboards are made of can help us read Hong Kong’s history from the 1970s and its changing landscape.

Michelle Wun Ting Wong completed her PhD studies in Art History at The University of Hong Kong in 2025, exploring the modernity emerging from post WWII Hong Kong. From 2012–20 she was a researcher at Asia Art Archive (AAA), focusing on Hong Kong art history and histories of exchange and circulation through exhibitions and periodicals.

Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009) was a Hong Kong-based artist who made prints, sculptures, collage books, and was also a prolific photographer.

This podcast series is produced by Arianna Mercado and co-edited by Elisa Adami, Wing Chan, Adeena Mey and David Morris.

• https://open.spotify.com/episode/37zt4NB...
• https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/af...