Green Mong Kok in South Africa - Avoid Obvious Architects

Turning streets into gallery:

Micro Galleries turned streets in Langa, Cape Town into a gallery. Their mission is to “change the world in small and creative ways”.

Our work on Green Mong Kok and Documentation of the Umbrella Movement is featured in their show with Open Streets Langa. We are very excited and humbled that our creation of a local drawing and a local movement are now international. Special thanks to Kat Roma Greer from Micro Galleries who organized this event and all the photos below. The interaction between people and art is what made the event meaningful and successful. The idea is very similar to why we teach architecture to young children in Hong Kong. Our agenda is to influence the future leaders with creative thinking. I do believe this exhibition gave people in Cape Town a different idea about “art” and “freedom of speech”.

Kat Roma Greer was in Langa to organize the exhibition with her team. After the event, Kat said to the team”…Old guys were walking down the lane shaking our hands and saying thank you for doing this. It was so shocking and surprising and humbling. I heard endless conversations about the umbrella revolution, saw tonnes of people colouring, reading poems about sunflowers, looking at each detailed image of HK, laughing at space baby, pointing at political cartoons – even on small kid saying in halting English ‘freedom of speech’ reading a work from Sletch Freedom, amazing at the beauty and scale of the European forest. Amazing. Someone asked me about Australian politic and refugee centres, someone else asked how you can create via google images. It was just astounding.”

The idea of turning unused public spaces into exhibition spaces is a fantastic urban planning idea. Micro Galleries previously did it in Wan Chai and Tai Hang in 2013. There are so many public spaces in Hong Kong that can be turned into art projects, like hill that people used to hang clothes and the dark streets in Soho. I can’t wait to find more local spaces in Hong Kong and turn them into meaningful projects.

-Vicky Chan, Artist and Architect