TRUE TO ITS title, Upstairs/Downstairs - a Dialogue with Hong Kong, sprawls across the Broadway Cinematheque and the adjacent bookshop-cafe Kubrick at every level - although the whereabouts of the exhibits isn't immediately obvious.
Funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and curated by Anthea Fan Wah-jen, the $110,000 exhibition at the busy Yau Ma Tei venue features a range of video, performance, installation and short film screenings aimed at rare visitors to art shows.
Fan, of the Art Map group, got the idea for the exhibition last year. 'I observed quite a different environment there [in Yau Ma Tei] as an outsider,' says the Taiwanese artist. 'Private things happening in public places and public activities taking place in private households.' With this in mind, she invited four local artists to comment on these myriad uses of space that's so particular to Hong Kong.
Art Map co-founder Lukas Tam Wai-ping came up with Second Reality, which includes performance, photography, installation and video. He's also continuing with his recent work that explores UV-reactive paint left on unusual surfaces - almost like a space-age version of graffiti. Tam leaves messages in places that can be read only when the right lighting is applied. The surfaces have ranged from a bomb shelter in Taiwan - where he left the delicate swirls of Chinese scroll antique wallpaper design - to his skin.
'It looks beautiful, but at the same time it's a bomb shelter and violent,' says Tam. 'This kind of decorative pattern can't cover the heaviness of the truth.'
He's also playing on the idea of secrecy mixed with the concept of home. He says he searched the streets of Yau Ma Tei for a love hotel, where 'the young ladies have become old women'. Finding one, he covered a quilt cover in UV-reactive paint, then crawled in bed and took photos.