Located on the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula in Tsim Sha Tsui, The Peninsula Hotel, opened in 1928, has been synonymous with Old World grandeur ever since. Just in time for the Hong Kong edition of Art Basel, the hotel unveiled its latest art initiative. Four works by Elise Morin, Kingsley Ng, Lachlan Turczan and Saya Woolfalk are on display on the hotel’s extensive grounds to relaunch the Art in Resonance program.The iconic hotel brought curators Isolde Brielmaier, deputy director of the New Museum in New York, and Bettina Prentice, art advisor, on board to select the artists and curate the program. Since the end of March, guests and visitors to the hotel have been able to discover a collection of several works.

The first piece can already be experienced outside: Hong Kong artist Kingsley Ng created a floating sculpture that can be seen on the exterior facade of the building. Ng describes Esmeralda as “undulating between the physics of gravity and the buoyancy of air”. According to the artist, the work, named after a fictional place from Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities, is intended to be in dialog with Hong Kong itself.Upon entering the hotel’s historic lobby, visitors are immediately greeted by a large glittering pile. The sculptural work SOLI by French artist Elise Morin shows shredded CDs, some of which are even pulverized (depending on the degree of safety of their contents) and placed over a curved form. The shape is reminiscent of a whale cracking the surface of the sea—a gentle reference to the material weight of objects.

The wide staircase leads over a heavy carpet to the second floor of the hotel. Deep and muffled sounds can already be felt here until the kinetic sculpture by Lachlan Turczan unfolds in front of the visitor. Harmonic Resonance, a work which deals with the exploration of visible sound, is located directly in front of the buffet restaurant The Verandah. The work consists of a parabolic mirror, which forms a shallow pool of water with a series of choreographed infrasonic sounds that invite the audience to participate.

The low-frequency sounds create oscillating patterns on the surface of the water, some of which appear to move as if in stop-motion. The fourth work in the Art in Resonance program can be experienced in the hotel’s arcade. Visionary Reality Portal, a colorful, kaleidoscopic and multi-sensory video installation by Saya Woolfalk is a digital portal for meditation and the contemplation of other worlds.