When Treadmills Become Mountains: A Radical Reimagining of Landscape in Hong Kong
What if I told you that the most profound meditation on nature in Hong Kong isn’t found in its countryside parks, but on the sweat-stained belt of a gym treadmill? This is the provocative question at the heart of Zoie Yung’s The Pleasure-Dome of Hills—a curatorial experiment that doesn’t just bridge ancient Chinese aesthetics with modern urbanity but smashes them together to create something entirely new. Let me be clear: this isn’t your grandfather’s ink painting exhibition. It’s a hallucinogenic remix of tradition, where Ming Dynasty furniture whispers secrets to wearable tech, and the act of running on a treadmill becomes a poetic dialogue with centuries of landscape art.
The Illusion of Separation Between Past and Present
Yung’s genius lies in her refusal to treat history as a static relic. By placing Qing Dynasty zitan tables next to Dave Chow Yui Wang’s treadmill-ink hybrid Constancy, she forces us to confront a uncomfortable truth: our obsession with categorizing “old” and “new” is a false binary. Personally, I think this reflects Hong Kong’s entire existential condition—where 18th-century temples coexist with skyscrapers like competing realities bleeding into each other. The exhibition doesn’t just display artifacts; it creates a time-warped playground where a 400-year-old chair and a smartphone-wielding artist occupy the same energetic frequency.
What many people don’t realize is that this collision isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about survival. In a city where land reclamation projects literally reshape the coastline monthly, Yung’s curation becomes an act of cultural preservation through reinvention. When I walked through similar hybrid spaces in Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, I felt disoriented—here, the disorientation is deliberate, a strategy to make us question why we cling to rigid definitions of “tradition” in the first place.
How a Treadmill Became a Mountain
Let’s talk about Chow Yui Wang’s Constancy—a work that made me laugh out loud before hitting me with existential vertigo. By transferring treadmill belt impressions onto rice paper, Chow transforms the banal grind of urban fitness culture into a metaphor for spiritual pilgrimage. From my perspective, this piece captures the absurdity and beauty of Hong Kongers’ relationship with nature: we hike crowded trails in designer sneakers, meditate through AirPods, and now apparently create sacred art via Peloton. But beneath the irony lies a deeper truth: in a city of 7.5 million, our mountains are now conceptual as much as geological.
A detail that I find especially interesting is how the treadmill’s mechanical repetition mirrors the meditative repetition of traditional ink strokes. The machine’s industrial grooves become a calligraphic language of modernity. Is this genius, gimmick, or both? I’d argue it’s a Trojan horse—visitors might come for the novelty, but they leave questioning whether the Song Dynasty masters would’ve used Photoshop if they’d had it.
The Urban Landscape as Collective Delusion
The exhibition’s real power lies in its commentary on perception. Yung’s “modern literati studio” isn’t a physical space—it’s a cognitive framework. Walking through Ora-Ora’s galleries, I couldn’t stop thinking about my own daily hikes up Victoria Peak, where office workers in Lululemon pants trudge past wild boars and colonial-era fortifications. Hong Kong has always been a palimpsest, but Yung weaponizes that chaos, suggesting that our landscapes are ultimately mental constructs shaped by memory and desire.
This raises a deeper question: In the Anthropocene era, is any landscape truly “natural” anymore? The hiking trails Yung references are meticulously maintained by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department. Even the wild grasses are curated. If we follow this thread, Chow’s treadmill ink might be more honest than traditional shanshui paintings—it doesn’t pretend to depict an untouched wilderness.
Why This Matters Beyond Hong Kong
While the exhibition is rooted in this specific city’s contradictions, its implications are universal. Every metropolis today is a battlefield between erasure and preservation, between the wrecking ball and the heritage plaque. Yung’s work offers a third path: evolution without amputation. It’s the opposite of Dubai’s approach of tearing down the past to build fantasy islands; instead, Hong Kong’s way is messier, more neurotic, and ultimately more human.
What this really suggests is that the future of cultural continuity lies not in museums’ climate-controlled vitrines, but in the chaotic interfaces where traditions get reprogrammed by WiFi signals and urban anxiety. When I think about similar experiments in Berlin’s juxtaposition of techno clubs and baroque architecture, or Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parades turning into Instagram spectacles, Yung’s exhibition feels like part of a global movement toward hybrid identities.
Final Thoughts: The Hallucination We All Need
I left The Pleasure-Dome of Hills with a strange sensation—that I’d just witnessed something both deeply conservative and radically progressive. By refusing to let tradition calcify, Yung honors it more authentically than any replication could. In 50 years, will Hong Kong’s Gen Z curators recreate our current VR art installations with the same reverence? I’m not sure, but I do know this: the next time I pass one of those soulless corporate skyscrapers with faux-ink murals in the lobby, I’ll remember Chow’s treadmill and smile at the joke.
Art isn’t about preserving the past—it’s about hijacking it to describe realities its creators couldn’t imagine. And in that sense, Yung’s hallucination might be the only sane way to navigate a city where the mountains are real, the rivers are fake, and everyone’s hiking uphill on moving belts to feel alive.
