Hong Kong Canadian interdisciplinary artist Michelle Fung’s lifelong interdisciplinary oeuvre revolves around a grand dystopian world-building narrative set in the year 2084. She had a recent solo exhibition at the national museum Art Gallery Boris Georgiev, Varna, Bulgaria as the invited guest artist of the Quarantine Film Festival (2022) and has held recent solo exhibitions at leading artist-run galleries in Australia (2019) and California (2018), as well as in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2019.)

Her works have garnered many local and international awards, including the 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and Vogue Hong Kong Women’s Art Prize. Her short films have been selected at many international film festivals and she has participated in many prestigious international residencies, including the Guanlan Original Printmaking Base, Shenzhen, China (2023), the Arctic Circle, International Territory of Svalbard (2022), Art Omi, NY, USA (2016) and Banff Centre, Canada (2010).

Artwork Caption

Giant Puffins at Northlandia’s Southern Border

To slow down rising temperatures in her country, the Ice Queen has stationed
hundreds of giant puffins at its southern border, whose task is to blow the rising
warm air southward around the clock. The background mountains are Nordenskioldfjellet Summit just on the outskirts of Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town. For the artist’s first five days in town, she had a spectacular view of the summit in her window.

*There are also no puffins in Svalbard, but the puffins the artist saw on Grimsey, a remote island within the Arctic Circle, back in 2013 left such a strong impression. The island is home to fewer than 100 people but over one million seabirds, including the famous puffins.

Mother Spirit the Snowy Owl

Mother Spirit, a snowy owl, is the Ice Queen’s great great-great-great-

great-grandmother, and lives in an ice cave. No one knows the path to

the ice cave except for the royal family (i.e. the Ice Queen and her sister). No one knows how old Mother Spirit is and whether she is still alive or has become a goddess. Whenever the Ice Queen has dilemmas she doesn’t know how to solve, she treks for days to the secret ice cave to seek her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s advice.

Mountain-size Penguin Ice-Cream Maker

The walrus magicians are experimenting with a plan to rebuild

glaciers with a mountain-size ice-cream maker, in the form of an

Art Noveau penguin. Furthermore, the ice-cream maker absorbs

atmospheric warm air through its buttock tube and radiates cold air

through its head!

Right now, this process generates a large amount of ‘cold’ energy that turns out the creamiest ice-cream!

Seal Seal Seal!!! (Polar Night)

You really need to know seals to really get this.

They are so nosy.

They pop up and stare at you.

They follow your boat and zodiacs.

In Northlandia, the Ice Queen trains her fat jumpy seal military troop

to fend off the other four G5 nations, which are waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce on Northlandia for precious resources.

The Ice Queen and Her Princess Sister

On the artist’s arctic trip, our leader Sarah looked over her woodblock

in progress and told her about the Greenlanders’ myth of the Northern

Lights.

‘They think the magical moving lights in the sky happen when their ancestors play football (soccer) with a walrus skull.’

The artist added a football for her walrus northern lights.

In Northlandia, the walrus magicians spend sleepless nights capturing

wild aurora borealis and cultivating artificial ones for future fuel. Here

you see them cooking up the artificial magical lights in their cauldron

and releasing them into the sky.