YANG Hao is a dance artist born in Chongqing and based in Hong Kong. He received a full scholarship by the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2007 and he joined City Contemporary Dance Company as a dancer from 2009 to 2012. He was resident artist at the Seoul International Festival in 2013, Dance WEB scholarship receiver for ImpulseTanz 2014, and, from 2015 to 2016, he was the first Arts Fellow of Yale-China and HK ETO in New York. He has received commissions by the Hong Kong Arts Festival 2012 to 2018 and the New Haven International Festival Arts Ideas in 2016. Hao was a grantee of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council for cultural exchange and New Arts Power platform from 2016 to 2019. His current research at the School of Creative Media centres around alternative relationships between media, technology and performance.
CHOW Chi Hang Cody is an interactive media and time-based media artist visualizing sound. His most recent artwork focuses on immersive environments and sonic art installations using Touchdesigner and Arduino. Cody believes that, like sparkling prisms, contemporary artists' expressions have been constantly under several simultaneous stimuli nowadays and, as a result, it seems our perception is increasingly getting used to this pattern. Therefore, he seeks out for crossdisciplinary artworks and projects that become deeply relevant for contemporary audiences.
XING Tong is a student from City University of Hong Kong, working primarily with script writing and experimental film. His works explore the relationship between abstraction and politics, sound and image, poetry and truth, reality and illusion.
HIM
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many performing artists to transform and adapt their works into digital platforms. Waiting indefinitely for the end of the epidemic, dance artist YANG Hao had to consider turning his original creation into a digital version and publishing it on an online platform. Since many of his works are solo and talk shows, he tried to use artificial intelligence to create an avatar (virtual Haohao), an exact version of himself in the virtual world. When this avatar appeared, Yang Hao saw himself as if looking in a mirror. In most multimedia dance performances, multimedia is usually used as a presentation tool, rather than a theme to explore. What the audience usually sees is a new technological magic effect, while the human body and media don’t have any actual connection. In HIM, Hao uses both accessible hardware from ordinary life, such as mouse sliding on the screen, and relatively high-tech motion capture to represent a unique dance and multimedia performance.