Biography

Ho-Yin Fung has been educated in various areas of Design, Adverting & Photography. Before started teaching at the tertiary education institute, he has been working as design consultant in the product and graphic design fields for some years. Ho-Yin is now an assistant professor at the School of Design of the HK Hong Kong Polytechnic University
In the recent years, Ho-Yin has developed interests in the application of photographic images on various physical media, as well as the revitalization of alternative photographic processes.
His work has been exhibited internationally; and collected by local and international museums.

Academic Paper

Promoting Printmaking to Enhance Social Capital –
‘Together We Stride’: A Hong Kong Open Printshop Community Art Project
Community art projects are widely believed to have positive impacts on the society – in terms of the enhancement of the social capital. The Hong Kong Open Printshop has been using printmaking as the tool in a publicly funded community art project called ‘Together We Stride’ (TWS) for the past 3 years, and, has been seeing some encouraging outcomes, both artistically and socially. This paper seeks to share with the international printmaking community the project in details as idea conceptualization, processes, until the outcomes. So that similar ideas can be exchanged and promoted for the wider good of the arts and the society.
From the disastrous attack of SARS in 2003, Hong Kong experienced a unique crisis socially; it was then followed by the economic down turn right after. The TWS project was conceived to help to rehabilitate the grassroots of Hong Kong – particularly the under-privileged and marginal groups, via public funding allocated for art development and promotion endeavours.
Emphasis will be placed on how the project built itself on the 3 major aspects of social capitals – bonding, bridging and linking – particularly in the local context of Hong Kong. From the various stages from conceptualization, planning, budgeting, implementation, and following-up, the paper will unveil how the Hong Kong Open Printshop deals with the specific conditions of the Hong Kong society, as well as the local government bodies, in order to get the project through to the grand finale exhibitions.

My framing interest in this area is the perpetuation of linear, hierarchical models of speciation within natural history museums. I believe that museum display has not responded to contemporary ways of understanding speciation or knowledge, choosing to adhere to a visual methodology that recalls tree-like, discrete divisions of nature, deferring to a Christian symbolic inheritance in both the iconography of evolution and display. In this paper I wish to focus on the impact of Christianity on the form of the book and suggest that, when seen within the context of books of natural history, ancient notions of hierarchy of being – the scala naturae – are resident within its structure. The book has provided the instructive model on which display within museums has been based. This idea is complicated by the presence of images within books and two questions that emerge are: how did the introduction of illustrated texts change the reception of ideas that were previously presented solely as text, and what is the role of texts and the book as a form in the transmission of scientific knowledge?