Video game art on M+ facade sees players ‘cycle’ around Hong Kong in love letter to city

Inside M+ museum, bike riders navigate a virtual Hong Kong where Chinese characters replace buildings, their progress shown on museum facade

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Legible City Hong Kong, shown on the facade of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, is an interactive artwork in which “players” take a virtual bike ride through a Hong Kong built of text from an imaginary love letter. Photo: M+

Published: 7:15am, 29 Jul 2024

Every night until October 6, a giant love letter to Hong Kong will appear conspicuously on the outside wall of M+, the city’s museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Legible City Hong Kong is a new commission for the M+ facade by Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw. It is a video game of sorts in which a player can “navigate” a virtual city made up of three-dimensional Chinese characters by riding a special exercise bicycle inside the museum that is connected to the big outdoor screen. A smaller screen in front of the bike shows players their progress.

This work is based on Shaw’s 1980s series “Legible City”. Back then, he made three versions, set in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Manhattan in New York, and Karlsruhe, a city in Germany.

As in the Hong Kong piece, the basic structure of each was modelled on the local street map and all the buildings were replaced by text.

Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw stands by the stationary bicycle members of the public can use to navigate his new work Legible City Hong Kong, at M+ museum. Photo: M+

These earlier works have no geographical markers – all three urban areas are pretty flat, after all – but the text gives a sense of place.