Indie art toys, model bus collectibles, and mini-iterations of disappearing streetscapes in Hong Kong show that miniature is more than smallness.

It offers ways of rethinking the city it represents through the shifts in scale that it enacts. Reducing and enlarging, absorbing and distancing, mobilising and capturing, miniature generates images that captivate and enchant while pointing to questions of labour, information, and power in the urban environment of one of late capitalism’s 'model' cities.

Working with miniature as a method, Emily Verla Bovino, a 2021 M+/Design Trust Research Fellow, shares moments from over fifty conversations conducted with people variously involved in three areas of miniature selected for their relation to body, infrastructure, and architecture. The presentation follows mai nei (mini) Hong Kong across scales—cosmic, planetary, urban, object, network, gesture, material, and aesthetic.

Bovino will present her research findings, followed by a panel discussion with artists Nadim Abbas and Michelle Chan Wan Chee. This event will be moderated by M+ Curator of Design and Architecture Sunny Cheung. Simultaneous interpretation in Cantonese will be available.

Click on ‘Register’ to register for this hybrid event taking place at The Forum, M+ or to receive the link and join the conversations via Zoom.

Nadim Abbas is an artist-researcher and currently a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Visual Arts HKBU, theorizing in miniature as an art practice. His interests in otaku, anime cosmogonies, video games, and global supply chains inform the complex set pieces he creates in which objects disappear into their own semblance and bodies succumb to the seduction of space.

Michelle Chan Wan Chee works with photography as social practice. Her maternal uncle passed away and left behind a vast assortment of Hong Kong model buses. Since then, Chan has experimented with and looked at the city through miniature across scales—from the rituals of baai saan (ancestor worship), bus routes favoured by enthusiasts, the maps of transit planning, and intergalactic imaginings in anime.