HONG KONG -- They perch mildly connected factual ledges. They nestle into peeling stucco. Occasionally, they soar crossed a chromatic house's rooftop.
A flock has landed successful Wang Tong Village, a peaceful country of Lantau Island connected Hong Kong’s southwestern edge. But this flock is dissimilar others: Its birds are made of paint.
They beryllium connected murals designed for a larger intent — not simply to gully attraction to forgotten places but to archer the communicative of the bonzer journeys birds undertake.
Dominic Johnson-Hill, who envisioned the flock, was captivated by an relationship from his ornithologist neighbour astir the Amur falcon, a vertebrate that travels from Manchuria, pauses successful Lantau, past continues its migration crossed Myanmar, India and Madagascar to South Africa.
“I conscionable assumed these birds lived connected the island,” Johnson-Hill recalls. “But they’re not. They’re passing guests.”
That consciousness of wonderment became the effect for what became the Flock Project. Johnson-Hill looked astatine the abandoned location adjacent to his ain and imagined a red-billed bluish magpie painted crossed the wall. “They conscionable seemed to beryllium there,” helium says.
To bring the imaginativeness to life, Johnson-Hill sought retired idiosyncratic who could overgarment birds not conscionable accurately but with soul. He recovered British creator Rob Aspire, known arsenic “The Birdman” for his intricate, expressive murals of birds.
One vertebrate led to another. A twelvemonth later, Johnson-Hill invited Aspire backmost and commissioned 7 much murals.
Each vertebrate was chosen for its ecological presence, ocular harmony oregon symbolic resonance with place. A kingfisher keeps ticker implicit a watercourse wherever sportfishing is nary longer allowed. A Swinhoe’s white-eye blends into the walls adjacent trees wherever its bright, fluting telephone inactive echoes.
All the murals are painted connected abandoned homes but one. High connected Sunset Peak, 868 meters (nearly 3,000 feet) supra oversea level, a long-tailed shrike perches people connected the rooftop of a 90-year-old chromatic house, watching the mountains unfold below.
The extremity is to gradually bring much of Hong Kong’s autochthonal and migratory birds into view, nestling them into forgotten corners of the land arsenic if they had ever lived there.
The murals gully hundreds of people, galore from Hong Kong's factual heart. They rotation the trails and alleys of Lantau’s quiescent corners. On weekends, immoderate bring chalk and people retired arrows, turning colony paths into treasure maps for the adjacent vertebrate hunter. Sometimes noticing quality is the archetypal measurement toward wanting to support it.
Johnson-Hill has created an online representation for visitors and is readying the adjacent phase. What comes adjacent depends connected what reveals itself — a derelict location brought to his attention, oregon the conditions that marque different vertebrate possible.
Birds migrate. They disappear. Sometimes they return, sometimes not. People are the aforesaid way. Villages empty, but the walls stay — with a painted bird, oregon the representation of one.
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