“Images… once they are fixed in words, are erased. On the other hand, once you have seen what the words say, it is impossible to unsee”.

In this exhibition, we use Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as a textual reference to portray, interpret and represent the complexity and diversity of the urban landscape. The city of Hong Kong is used as a background for the representation of the imaginary cities in Calvino’s book.

Invisible Cities is a novel. It does not deal with recognizable cities, the cities in the book are all inventions (and all named after women). In an interview shortly before he died, Calvino remarked that the descriptions contained in the book were intended to give rise to reflections which hold for all cities or for the city in general.
The book chronicles conversations between the aging Emperor Kublai Khan and the youthful explorer Marco Polo where the latter recounts stories and tales of his experiences travelling to 55 cities in Khan’s empire. These short dialogues are provocateurs extraordinaire in their imaginative potential. The 55 cities are divided in 11 themes: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and signs, trading cities, thin cities, cities and eyes, cities and names, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, continuous cities, and hidden cities. In fact, as many scholars suggest, the book may really be a reflection of his home place of Venice. This exhibition aims to explore
the uncountable cities that are hidden in every city.