The exhibition is the product of a collaborative drawing exchange project by students from Hong Kong Art School, Hong Kong and RMIT University School of Art, Melbourne.
The aim of the project was to demonstrate the creative richness of exchange and peer-to-peer practices but also to increase the shared awareness of each of our cohorts in the Melbourne and Hong Kong BAFA Program Art Studios.
The process was quite simple.
Hong Kong students were invited to take a photograph or image each of somewhere or something relevant to their Hong Kong studio spaces (at Shau Kei Wan or Chai Wan) and then to produce a small drawing in response using any mediums or style. Their reference image could be a detail, a view, a fragment, an abstraction or a sensation, colour or black and white, or any scale. Melbourne students were then invited to also make an interpretative drawing from the same photograph.
In turn, a new cohort of Melbourne students were invited to similarly supply an image sourced from their Melbourne art studio spaces, from which both they and another group HKAS students produced works on paper.
Students have not seen the paired responses until these exhibitions, where they are displayed side by side. The mediating image is not included, so what we see are responses to the same stimulus but not the stimulus itself.
The linked drawings extend across a range of approaches, mediums and motifs. Some are representational, others abstract or expressive or diagrammatic. Mediums range from graphite to thread and fabric, and much else in between. Each drawing is approximately 19.5cm high x 14cm wide and placed together with no gap between them – but sometimes the partners have rotated or manipulated the basic format.
What we the viewer experience then is a kind of hybrid – a single work made of parts. And we become engaged as we naturally try to discern the links and themes that bind the drawings together. We have a privileged overview that the artists themselves did not have.
Artistically, we experience a composite that involves us in the construction of meaning. We might for look for corresponding aesthetics and compositions, or mark making and colour palettes; we might perceive sympathetic sensibilities at play; or we might discern divergent critical approaches to the world.
In the end our visual scrutiny becomes the site of mediation as much as the absent source image was the provocation – the art works underline our role alongside the students.
Educationally, arts teaching is challenged by what cultural critic Rosalind Krauss has suggested is a possible transformation within the nature of art, from making objects to articulating connections between objects and subjects. How might our nurturing of art understand such shifts between artefacts and relationships?
Collaboration between students opens-up a transitional space where participants can materialise a sense of their own self but also share in the ideas of others. This secured space of play and creativity in fact models many other relations students forge during their learning and professional careers, as peer groups, within shared studios, or in the workshop.
One of the key questions we can ask of institutional studio practices is, what do studio processes reveal that is not shown by other modes of enquiry? Ordinarily the encounter of artwork is through the gallery, the review or criticism with an attendant focus upon the art object as commodity or aesthetic artefact.
In our project Shared Space the display of paired drawings remains formative; each response is true to itself and its own thinking through making. The methods are authentic, so the viewer is drawn into an open-ended dialogue without summative outcome. Education theorist Estelle Barrett suggests that knowledge of studio processes, shows how conventional valorisation of the artefact as product sometimes proceeds at the expense of an appreciation of the value of creative processes as modes of revealing. Her observation underlines the value for student-artist and viewer, as well as the educational institution of an encounter with the alternative logic of creative practice.
Let us celebrate then the trusting new modes of knowing these students have opened for themselves and us.
Associate Professor Dr Greg Creek
Program Lead, Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art)
Hong Kong Art School, RMIT University
Exhibition Period
26 Jan - 27 Feb 2026
Time
11am – 6pm (Closed on Sundays & Public Holidays)
展期
2026年1月26日至2月27日
時間
11am – 6pm (星期日及公眾假期休息)
Artist 藝術家
Tang Wing Yan, Aurora & Olivia Summerhayes
Tan Ki Chan, Candice & Creon Chia
Leung Sze Nga, Cecilia & Grace Artherton
Yeung Tsz Wing, Charlotte & Evania Klintberg
Wan Wing Lam, Esther & Hana Othen
Isaac Wong & Ella Flinn
Wong Sau Lai, Jackie & Isabella Sydney
Keung Tsz Yeung, Japheth & Kat Craine
Joanne Kong & Lucinda Elias
Karman Chiu & Larissa Linell
Kai Yan Au, Kathey & Marlon Stewart & Ella Price
Kathryn Chung & Colin Gong
Mok Fai, Matthew & Mika Cotton
Nicole Chwe & Caitlyn Liao, Onyx
Valentina Levina & Wong Ming Hing, Micky
Ka Shuen Yung, Edith & So Tsz Hei, So So
Flora Yu & Lee Hoi Yi, Freelie
Chan Ka Lee, Joyce & Au Hei Ting, Margaret
Ho Piu Yan & Tai Chung Man, Penguin
Alicio Martcho Subagyo & Helen Chui
Alisha Wiegold & Ng Yuen Wa, Sophia
Anamika Pushilal & Cheng Yin Yee, Amy
Eloise Bullard & Lai Shui Ching, Ben
Tate Maxwell & Ng Sum Yin, Kara
Mia Nguyen & Lam Chin Wang, James
Minette Cortada-McCorkell & Chan Ting, Lynette
Nahla El Azzouri & Arun Iyer
Aleksander Morris & Ines Alves
Rose Zhang & Yang Lu, Lence
Soraya Stuart-Smith & Wong Hok Yin, Eugene
Tansy, Tin Weng Cheong & Rheanna Mitchell
Dhishni De Silva & Lam Mei Shuen, Michelle
Wesley Kim & Wan Lok Lam, Christy
Yanni Yip & Leong Cheuk Kwan, Cindy
Hannah Stewart & Chan Po Yee, Bowie