Hours of a Billboard: Twenty-five Years of Art Intrusions on Causeway Bay's CVISION

On Hong Kong Island, in Causeway Bay, when you stand at the corner where Hennessy Road crosses Yee Wo Street, the entire outer wall of the SOGO Causeway Bay main building rises before you as a single screen. About seventy-two metres wide, nineteen metres tall. The 1,370-square-metre LED facade — an area described as the size of five tennis courts — keeps projecting footage of every hour, every minute, every second toward one of the highest pedestrian-density intersections on Hong Kong Island.

What flows in ordinary times is commercial advertising. Cosmetics, watches, automobiles, SOGO's own events. In the specs Mitsubishi Electric announced in 2017, this wall is calculated as an advertising apparatus projected to draw some 11.7 million views a month.

There is no objection to calling it a "billboard." But re-reading this wall from another time axis changes the scenery you see. There is a history in which the same hardware has turned, for a few limited hours a year, to an entirely different use. And that history did not begin in 2017; it continues from earlier, from the era of the previous-generation screen.

CVISION — The Apparatus's Provenance

This screen was given the proper name "CVISION" at its lighting in October 2017. The nickname is said to overlay the initials of Crystal, Color, and Captivating with the C of Causeway Bay. Manufacture was by Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision, the structural work by Hong Kong's AEL (Architectural Engineering Ltd.), and operation by SOGO's parent company Lifestyle International Holdings (HKEx 1212).

The physical specs were announced as among the largest in APAC at the time, in 2017. Three hundred sixty LED modules of 1.92 metres square, plus ten modules of 2.56 metres width, for a total of 370, compose a facade 72 metres wide × 19 metres tall. The resolution is 7,168 × 1,920 pixels. Designed as a structure that can display six full-HD panels vertically at once, a six-way vertical split is the basic operational format.

As a proprietary technology, Mitsubishi Electric's "Real Black" mechanism is adopted. It is said to deepen the contrast ratio by about fifty percent over conventional LED, and in addition the screen automatically adjusts brightness and volume according to the ambient brightness and environmental sound. It is a specification built in to simultaneously satisfy visibility as an advertising slot and the regulatory requirements of a commercial district.

The hardware itself is designed to efficiently run a continuous program of commercial advertising. That is beyond doubt as the apparatus's provenance. The point lies beyond it.

The SOGOvision Era — A Prehistory from 1998

Before CVISION was lit in 2017, there was a different previous-generation screen at the same position. The exact dimensions of this old screen, called SOGOvision, cannot be confirmed from public information, but it has been repeatedly confirmed in later references that Hong Kong's new-media art organization Videotage held its first public exhibition on this SOGOvision in 1998.

Videotage was founded in 1986 and has formed a corner of Hong Kong's contemporary-art infrastructure alongside Para Site and Asia Art Archive. The fact that its earliest public exhibition was held on an advertising screen mounted on a commercial building's facade looks, in retrospect, strangely precocious.

At the point of 1998, the idea of "inserting video art inside an advertising slot" had sprouted not in Tokyo or Shanghai but at one intersection in Hong Kong. It is a very early-generation precedent of the hybrid operation of commercial advertising slots and art programming that would later be observed at New York's Times Square and Seoul's COEX.

The hardware changed generation in 2017, but the relationship between Videotage and SOGO continued across that boundary. An exhibition in March 2019, preparation for which began the year after CVISION's completion, would make that continuity visible. That said, the intrusions observable on CVISION around that period were not led by Videotage alone.

The Koi of February 2019 — When the Operator Commissions

One of the first clearly non-advertising contents incorporated into CVISION's programming was not led by an outside curator but was a bumper for "a break from advertising" that SOGO itself directly commissioned. In February 2019, the British illustrator Rod Hunt, teaming with the animation production company Bewilder.tv, produced for CVISION the short animation known as the "Koi Bumper."

By Rod Hunt's own public materials, SOGO cited the style of short bumper videos that present a channel's personality — like those of MTV or Adult Swim — as a reference point, and ordered the insertion onto CVISION of a creative "interval" of a line separate from clear commercial advertising. An isometric urban-landscape animation that looks out over the city from Jardine's Lookout on Hong Kong Island, passes Hong Kong Stadium and Victoria Park, and finally closes into the CVISION screen, converging on a school of koi swimming out to fill the screen. The choice of the koi motif was inspired by the Nan Lian Garden pond of Chi Lin Nunnery on Hong Kong Island, drawing on the symbol of abundance in Chinese culture.

The owner of the hardware — the operator itself — plans a short bumper video and orders it from an outside producer. This is a third mode of intrusion, separate from both the joint project with Videotage discussed next and the 2023 program via Art Innovation Gallery. CVISION's programming, only a little over a year from completion, already held room for several editing entities to coexist.

The Three Minutes of March 2019 — Artificial Landscape

In March of that same 2019, another mode arrives. In a period almost adjacent to Rod Hunt's bumper (operator-commissioned), a month-long exhibition titled Artificial Landscape was incorporated into CVISION's programming, co-presented by SOGO Arts and Culture and Videotage. The run was 4 to 31 March. The curator was Isaac Leung, who served as Videotage's Artistic Director. The participating artists were four: Carla Chan, Chilai Howard (鄭智禮), Lawrence Lek, and Shi Zheng.

The format has a distinctive feature. Each artist's three-minute video work is played on the hour within the daily operating time. Within the continuous program of advertising slots, every time the clock strikes the hour, art appears for just three minutes. More than ten times a day, nearly four hundred times in a month. The phrasing in the Hong Kong Free Press headline — "Hong Kong's largest video billboard is taken over by art" — is correct as the rhetoric of the event, while the reality of the operation was far more delicate. It was not a takeover but a format of timed insertion into the gaps of the advertising program.

Shi Zheng's entry Embers was footage that staged an artificial landscape in the most literal way, with moving sky, mountains, and rock masses.

Chilai Howard's O was a work that drone-filmed the very intersection in front of SOGO and, by computer tracking, drew artificial connection lines among the pedestrians. It returned the apparatus's physical location itself as material, a device that inverted the boundary between screen and street. Lawrence Lek's contribution Nøtel took the very form of an advertisement for a fictional fully automated luxury hotel chain, "Nøtel Cørpøratiøn," composed to re-question, from one meta level up, the semantics of the advertising slot that is CVISION's original use.

The words Leung left in an interview with Zolima show this exhibition's editorial view well.

Because of its scale, the SOGO screen plays a role in constructing the landscape of Causeway Bay. Every day, tens of thousands of pedestrians are disrupted by it.

— Isaac Leung, in Zolima CityMag (2019)source

To critique, with the same apparatus, a device that disrupts pedestrians' lines of movement. This becomes possible by swapping only the programming while preserving the billboard's physical scale. What a department-store facade LED like CVISION does daily is a kind of urban apparatus that acts, almost unconsciously, on the body of the human standing at the Causeway Bay intersection. Artificial Landscape inverted that action for just three minutes on the hour, surfacing it as an observable object.

The Seven Days of March 2023 — No Rioters

March 2023, four years later. On CVISION there appeared a different kind of art intrusion.

As a satellite slot of Hong Kong Art Week 2023, the Milan-based curatorial organization Art Innovation Gallery deployed a video exhibition titled The Sound of Pixels on CVISION. Among the short works by more than seventy digital artists was a new work, No Rioters, by Patrick Amadon, who works out of Los Angeles.

The release was 17 March 2023. The surface footage was a glitch-heavy red-and-black cyberpunk-style fashion advertisement, with a CCTV surveillance-camera motif repeated. At first glance it is indistinguishable from the other advertising in Causeway Bay. But in a corner of the screen and in the background text, the names, ages, and prison terms of people imprisoned in connection with Hong Kong's protest movement were superimposed in flashes too fast to follow with the naked eye. At the lower left of the footage, the small text "No Rioters Under Tyranny"; somewhere on the screen, a "Free Hong Kong" graffiti tag.

For several days after release, the broadcast on CVISION itself proceeded as scheduled. The current changed after the pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po published an article criticizing the content on 22 March. The next day, the 23rd, by Lifestyle International's decision, No Rioters was pulled from CVISION's programming. Amadon himself posted the fact of removal that same day on his X (formerly Twitter) account. The time the footage was on CVISION was, roughly, less than a week.

X (Twitter)

クリックすると埋め込みを読み込みます。読み込み時に閲覧情報が X Corp. に送信されます。

Load / 読み込むX (Twitter) で開く

What we want to discuss here as TENKEI is not the evaluation of the political content itself. The point lies elsewhere.

Several tacit premises are woven into hardware designed as commercial advertising. Only material the advertiser has approved flows. Material is proofread in advance and has passed the brand side's regulations. Viewers do not read every corner of the screen with the naked eye. These premises function without problem in ordinary operation.

What No Rioters showed was that those premises are not guaranteed at the physical layer. In a screen with a resolution close to ten thousand pixels, it is difficult for the operating side to detect in advance a string of text flashed in less than a second. Amadon diverted CVISION's physical attributes — the overwhelming scale, the high density of the full-HD panels, the APAC-leading view count — directly into a transmission medium for a political message. It is an event that arose, owing to the screen's high definition, out of the asymmetry between the side that approves material and the side that reads it.

There is a tone of irony in Amadon's remarks after the removal. That itself is not the concern of this essay. The concern is rather the fact that a single piece of hardware called CVISION posts both the advertising apparatus and the political intrusion by the same procedure. The apparatus, as an apparatus, accepts both programs without technically distinguishing them.

Asia's Department-Store Facade LEDs, Two Poles

An apparatus with almost the same physical type as CVISION had also been placed on Inokashira Street in Tokyo's Shibuya since 2015. The four columns in front of the A-building entrance of the Seibu Shibuya store, chroma actor. Permanently installed by the German artist Carsten Nicolai in time for a large-scale renewal, this work has, for thirteen and a half hours a day from opening to closing, over eleven years, kept translating the movement of passers-by and the temperature, date, and weather of a remote location into color. Scheduled for removal with the store's closing, the work is taken up in this journal's Vol.01.

chroma actor and CVISION, while sharing the same hardware type of "a department-store facade large LED apparatus," stand at opposite points in their operating models.

In chroma actor, the frame of the screen itself is the art work. For eleven years, commercial advertising has never once flowed on that face. It is a format that secures a "permanent art-only section" within the commercial space and fixes operational responsibility on the artist's side. An art slot separated from advertising, by definition, does not encroach on the time of advertising.

CVISION is the inverse format. The apparatus's provenance remains a billboard to the end, and for a few limited periods a year, outside curators (Videotage, Art Innovation Gallery) make timed insertions of art into the gaps of the advertising program. The posting of art is the exception, not the hardware's main use.

Between these two poles, the operating space of the contemporary Asian department-store facade LED almost entirely fits. The permanent type lets a brand send a cultural statement over the long term, but to keep balance with annual revenue, the slot tends to be small from the design stage. The timed-insertion type can maximize the apparatus's scale itself, but the programming right is split from the advertiser, and the art intrusion is always a matter of negotiation. Both have merits and demerits, and it is hard to say either one is "right."

Reading through CVISION's twenty-five years, it becomes clear that this apparatus has stood at the timed-insertion pole all along. From the SOGOvision era of 1998, through Rod Hunt's koi bumper of February 2019 (operator-commissioned), Artificial Landscape of March that year (co-presented with an outside curator), to No Rioters of 2023 (via an outside presenter's program), the programming has always been advertising-led, and non-advertising content — even as the form of commission changed — has appeared as a guest entering the gaps of the time axis.

Hours of a Billboard

There are people who stand at the Causeway Bay intersection and look up at CVISION. Such a person sees, depending on the moment, something different — whether what flows on the screen today is a fifteen-second cosmetics spot, the three-minute artificial landscape of 2019, or the flash-like political text of 2023. But the apparatus barely distinguishes the difference.

The figural staffage (tenkei) of a landscape painting was the concept by which small figures or boats drawn into the scene turn the surrounding mountains and rivers, by their presence, into something alive. The three minutes or seven days in CVISION's programming come close to that staffage. Into the 11.7-million-views-a-month plastered over with advertising, a foreign body that can be counted on one hand a year is mixed in. When the observer's side notices that foreign body, the scenery of the Causeway Bay intersection begins to be re-read not as the mere billboard that stays there but as a slightly more complex apparatus.

What is programmed continuously on CVISION is left to the operational judgment of the moment. The policy after No Rioters cannot be confirmed from public information at the time of writing. But as long as the apparatus's physical layer does not change, the room for something to happen structurally remains. The continuous program of a billboard always holds, somewhere in the twenty-four hours of a day, a gap of three minutes or seven days.

It is an apparatus worth continuing to watch for what appears in that gap.

---

Sources

1. fig.001Rod Hunt — SOGO CVISION Koi Bumper Animation for 76m HD Video Wall(2019-02)
2. fig.002Shi Zheng — Embers(2017、_Artificial Landscape_ 出品作)(2017)
3. fig.003Lawrence Lek — Nøtel(2016–、_Artificial Landscape_ 出品作)(2016)
4. fig.004Patrick Amadon — No Rioters 取り下げ報告(X)(2023-03-23)
5. fig.005Art Innovation Gallery — The Sound of Pixels - Hong Kong(展示風景)(2023-03)
6. [6]Mitsubishi Electric — Largest Diamond Vision in the Asia Pacific at SOGO Hong Kong(プレス)(2017-02-07)
7. [7]LEDinside — Mitsubishi Electric Unveils the Largest Diamond Vision in the Asia Pacific Region at SOGO Hong Kong(2017-10)
8. [8]Inside Retail Asia — SOGO Causeway Bay giant LED screen switched on(2017-10-27)
9. [9]WWD — Sogo Department Store Unveils APAC’s Largest Screen(2017-10)
10. [10]AEL Hong Kong — SOGO Department Store LED Installation Project
11. [11]CVISION 公式
12. [12]Videotage — Artificial Landscape, 人造風景(SOGO Causeway Bay)(2019-03)
13. [13]Zolima CityMag — Artificial Landscape: Hong Kong’s Largest Video Billboard is Taken Over By Art(2019)
14. [14]Art Innovation Gallery — The Sound of Pixels - Hong Kong(プレスリリース)(2023-03)
15. [15]Art Rights — The Sound of Pixels: NFT on display in Hong Kong(2023-03)
16. [16]Hong Kong Free Press — Artist ‘smuggles’ protester names, jail terms into giant billboard installation(2023-03-21)
17. [17]Hong Kong Free Press — Pro-protest billboard art removed as ‘it contained political messages,’ says gallery(2023-03-24)
18. [18]South China Morning Post — US artist says work featuring names of Hong Kong opposition activists removed from screen(2023-03)
19. [19]Videotage 公式
20. [20]SOGO Hong Kong 公式

Operations Record

OPERATOR

SOGO Hong Kong and its parent, Lifestyle International Holdings

LOCATION

Hong Kong

MODEL

Operator commission — Three time-limited modes coexist: direct operator commissions, co-curation with Videotage, and external programmes

CADENCE

Continuous advertising by default; art appears as timed insertions (e.g. three minutes on the hour for a month in March 2019)

SPEC

72 × 19 m (c. 1,370 m²), 7,168 × 1,920 px; a Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision, named CVISION at its 2017 lighting

SINCE

1998

STATUS

Active — The SOGOvision precursor dates to 1998; no art-programming policy has been published since the 2023 removal of No Rioters

View on the registry