A Mindful Trip to the Hong Kong Museum of Art

I’ve always been someone who doesn’t “get” visual art. Music, films, books, performances; those spoke to me. But paintings, photography… I could never seem to find the emotion the artist wanted me to find. I could never appreciate the layers of complexity in a painting, the abstraction of themes and visual motifs. The best I could muster when I saw a piece I liked is, “wow, that’s pretty neat.”

A big theme in the latter half of 2024, for me, has been slowing down. I’ve slowed to 2-3 books per month after the 4-5 of early 2024, and I take time for mindfulness every moment I can. It has opened up a whole realm of richness that I was unable to access when my mind was always thinking about what’s next or distracting itself with mindless entertainment.

This is the intention with which I went to the HK Museum of Art on Saturday. I don’t know where this came from (I think an episode of Philosophize This!), but I got this romantic notion that if I sat myself in front of a single painting for hours and hours, it would open itself up to me and reveal things I could not fathom by just a cursory glance.

Well—I didn’t go that extreme. Not for lack of trying, I just honestly got incredibly fidgety. But I did make a concerted effort to go slowly, really take in each piece and all it had to offer. I won’t pretend like I had some epiphany and now “get” visual art. I still feel a certain insecurity about my ability to grasp it all. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say. Or, in this case, a detailed painting of Rome wasn’t understood in a day.

“Ceremonious inactivity means, we do something, but to no end” - Byung-Chul Han

I completed one exhbit out of at least ten or fifteen at the HKMOA. The exhibit was the photography of Leo Wong mixed with his collection of Chinese paintings and caligraphy. Wong was a successful and acclaimed artist who worked mostly with black and white photos, but became stuck creatively and took 10 years off to find inspiration and collect art. The result is a cohesive collection that went on to inspire his now colored photographs.

I found Wong’s philosophy on photography almost eerily prescient, given the intention I set out with.

“Convinced that photography is about immediacy and preserving emotions instantaneously when the shutter is pressed, Dr. Wong has never resorted to computer editing in post-production. Instead, he insists on recording fleeting moments using every photographic technique possible before the film cartridge is unloaded.”

Thinking about photography as a record of fleeting moments made each piece more vibrant, and easier to connect with. I tried to transport myself into the moment that it was captured, and what I may have felt in that moment.

Beautiful things happen when you embrace the present moment and slow the compulsion towards activity. When you wander without a goal or a purpose. There is always something to do in our performance-driven society, but if we don’t take time to savor the present, what are we even living for?