Lantau, Hong Kong, 1998.

We won a commission to realize a permanent art installation in the main departure terminal of Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok International Airport, East Asia’s busiest airport and main transport hub. The airport was designed by the British architectural practice of Foster and Partners with construction complete by 1998. Hong Kong’s airport is defined by a single vast, cavernous space framed in glass and steel that combines all of the airport’s functions into one single “great hall,” with departure gates cantilevered over the arrivals hall; the latter exposed to the former in two vast open-air quadrangular spaces. The work, entitled Synergy of Dynamic Energy, occupies one of these spaces.

Synergy is a large hanging sculpture, much like a “mobile” that serves as a welcoming beacon of sorts, because arriving passengers pass under it after they have landed and make their way to passport control and customs. It consists of coloured, brushed metallic beams in the shape of icosehedra, which are arranged in an array of colours tied together by stainless steel cable wire. The beams are arranged to create eighteen geometric nodes, or modules, which symbolise the eighteen districts of Hong Kong; the spectrum of their colours represents the rich diversity found across Hong Kong’s districts.

The installation portrays the dynamic energy of Hong Kong as a whole, while also mimicking the dynamic energy of its immediate, day-to-day surroundings: the site of thousands of passengers, from all walks of life and all corners of the globe, in a synergy of movement.