Custodians of art's stories

Throwback to a pre-digital era

In a way, the "Portals…" show serves as a throwback to a physical, tactile and essentially pre-digital-era in which people made collage books out of old magazines by sticking pictures and newspaper clippings on them, as Ha did.

"Deliberating on how to translate the sensibility of Ha's physical archive into the digital sensibility that permeates our lives now" has been "the most exciting thing" about putting the show together, said curator Michelle Wong. "The tactile arrangement of the archive, like the boxes and folders he used, takes on a different experiential form with screen interfaces, video presentations etc. Materials like the contact sheets and the collage books respond to digital forms of presentation very differently," she said.

Indeed the touch screens that allow visitors to choose and instantly enlarge a slide of their choice, and magnified images of collage books projected on the wall for collective viewing underscore the ways in which looking at art has changed since Ha's time.