White pixelated script font on black background spelling the word loop. The O's are formed out of an infinity symbol.
A close up photograph of Wong's piece, Reflection. It shows black text in a white industrial elevator door, there is a hole at the centre.
A detail shot of Wong's piece, Reflection.
Loop
Loop is a collaboration between Nicholas Wong (HART, HK) and Millie Quick (BACKLIT, UK). The title refers to the self-generative nature of language through the interplay of cultures and mediums, creating a feedback loop.
Loop is a part of the wider Peer to Peer: UK/HK 2022 project; a digital programme and platform encouraging meaningful cultural exchange and forging enduring partnerships between the UK and Hong Kong’s visual arts sectors, organised by Open Eye Gallery and University of Salford Art Collection with support from Arts Council England. 

Provocations
Once deciding to use translation as a basis for the collaboration, Wong and Quick exchanged prompts for the other to translate using a method of their choice. Quick sent Wong a hand-drawn sigil, which he attempted to translate to the written word. Wong sent Quick the lyrics to a cantopop song called Innerspace by the group Mirror, which she translated homophonically.
Lyrics
The lyrics used by Wong from the song "Innerspace" by the cantopop group Mirror:
奇妙在瞬間 跌入這內循環
御宅族就是 我一個
白日夢亦是 理科
隨著小叮噹 收縮槍 縮小的我
入內在 慢慢觀摩
望著巨大 吊鐘
水花不分 西東
呼一呼 吸一吸 匹夫之勇
慢慢步入 食道 之中
讓血脈拋起我 被環抱
浪接浪衝更高 hoo
誰敢挑戰 胃酸可怕
甜酸苦澀 隨即消化
穿過心血管 看心跳多壯觀 發現愛嗎
Wake up 快跳進 這壯闊 宇宙
Get up 最暗處 載滿了 星斗
神經之中 窺探秘密
毛孔之中 躲進溫室
Wake up 太有趣 要你去 發掘
A geometric marker pen design on paper, shaped around a complex sigil. The sigil begins with shapes familiar as English letters, but twists and turns around itself, embracing the contours of the abstract prints behind it. The sigil is orange with pink oil pastel highlights, the prints are blue and black and the paper is purple, with central reliefs of white where the surface has been abraded.
Quick's initial provocation; a hand-drawn sigil.
A close up of Wong's work Reflection. It shows text printed on an industrial elevator door, we see the handle of the vertical doors in the foreground.
Reflection
"With Reflection (2022), Wong attempts to spark off an adventurous exchange that invites playfulness and possibilities between languages, pop culture and art installation. He not only translates loosely the lyrics from a Cantopop song titled “Innerspace” from Chinese into English but also changes the rhetoric of the lyrics by turning the statements into questions. The questions in Wong’s translation serve as a poem and meditative guide that asks viewers to reflect on their own existence, which echoes the song’s theme about the significance of looking inward."
- Nicholas Wong
A wide-shot of Wong's work, reflection.
Another close up of Wong's work, reflection.
Translations
Quick's homophonic (based on phonetic similarity) translations of Wong's initial prompt.
"What starts as the Chinese character 奇 evolves into new forms of zigzags, boxes and curves gradually. Around this are smaller pieces of English text and sigils. The sigils are indecipherable. The English words seem meaningless but poetic." 
- Millie Quick
Cross-pollination
Next came the process of coevolution. Through sharing initial translations with each other, Wong and Quick entered into a feedback loop that further influenced their final work. Wong, for example, being influenced by Quick's translations, created his work, Reflection (below).
An animation in the style of a tile puzzle, show how Wong and Quick's practices cross-pollinate each other.
Three photographs of a distorted human mannequin inscribed with chalk. The figure has no arms, and its eyes are obscured by a helmet. The body is bisected, with the helmet, shoulder pad and half the torso in red. Starting with defiantly monstrous fangs painted on half of the jaw, other areas are covered in black paint and have been filled with chalked text. The text on the top half combines Green Chinese characters, blue English words and white sigils. The upper leg piece is painted all black, with a large white sigil and a faded image of a cassette tape. The sculpture is set in front of the BACKLIT gallery building: an old redbrick factory with large arched windows under a blue sky with white clouds. The angles the figure is shot in mirror its geometry. There is a high visual contrast, as if viewed in an altered state: everything is vivid even when it is indecipherable.
Marginalia
Using the symbology developed during the translations of Wong's lyrics, Quick produced her final piece Marginalia.
"A distorted human mannequin inscribed with chalk. The figure has no arms, its eyes obscured by a helmet. The body is bisected, with the helmet, shoulder pad and half the torso in red. The jaw features defiantly monstrous fangs. The text on the top half combines green Chinese characters, blue English words and white sigils. The upper leg piece is painted all black, with a white sigil and a faded image of a cassette tape."
- Millie Quick
Two close up shots of Quick's work Marginalia. We see up close details showing chalk markings inscribed on the mannequin from the bottom of the torso to the side of the face.
Detail shots of Quick's piece, Marginalia.
Self Management
Wong’s final piece is a poem entitled “Self Management” which extracted phrases from Quick’s homophonic translation, and recontextualised them to echo the theme of “looking inward” in “Innerspace.”
An image showing Wong's final poem, Self Management. The text reads: To slowly, and as if by fate, come here as some did. To shunt from deep despair to deeper. To stop joking. To let moonlight draw near with a silly quality like a seal, unabashed, overfed, as it seems, in an aquatic park. To build my own body park, moronic moonlight inching on my skin. To let you taste my pubes, which could be thorns or tangy �fibers, depending on your tongue. To invite humor to seep into me, the park’s side doors, through and through, after hanging on a pole, weathered by the wind. To let the wind weather almost everything I �find hope in. To forgive (quite soon). To forget quite-soon-ness. To skeet-shoot by a lagoon and witness the song of missing the target sink after hurting the water surface, then the depths, to the bottom. To let the song sleep by the rocks and other handy junk visitors have dropped not quite for wishing, half-carelessly instead. To agree it is a better way to go on living. To appreciate a piece of driftwood shivering in sea-change. The long cold hugs of water. To write mournful summer songs— The sun’s hands cadent & high. Its lips, a thin break. To wear a toupee. To let fake hair get sunburnt. To look for a �floating green shawl with DAWN hand-sewn on it. To collect every wrenched one’s sins with a bowl by a door hinge. To make it back home. To �flunk turning raw languages into meaning. To let the foul rage of semantics splatter onto my chest. To lie in bed, simply, for days, and never ask the room what it feels to seek faith in strangers.
About
Nicholas Wong (HART, HK)
Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021). He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He has contributed writings to projects by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Manchester International Festival. He currently translates poetry by contemporary Taiwanese poet Sun Tzu-Ping. 

Nicholas has a background in English poetry writing, but the dimension of the page starts to bore him. He attempts to explore ways to creatively "translate" his own works into visual mediums. His visual outputs to be made during his time at HART Haus may be text-based, text-integrated, or text-induced, with an emphasis on the dynamics between imagery and texture, tonality and medium. 

Millie Quick (BACKLIT, UK)
Millie Quick is a queer Nottingham-based artist working with text, audio, video and performance to explore themes of euphoria, memory, and magic. Currently, she is particularly exploring the uncanny joys of hypnosis and sigilation.
For Millie, 2022 has been a year of firsts: her first solo exhibition at 1 Thoresby Street gallery, her first festival installation at Boomtown Fair, and Loop/P2P as her first international collaboration.

Tom Ireland (BACKLIT, UK)
Tom is a digital artist and animator. His practice uses generative systems and illustrations to create intriguing works that encourage playfulness and curiosity. He lives and works in the East Midlands, England.
BACKLIT
Founded in 2008, BACKLIT is an internationally renowned artist-led, public gallery and studios supporting arts and culture in Nottingham.
HART 
Based in Hong Kong, HART is a not-for-profit arts organisation with a mission to foster collaboration and community value through a sustainable culture of creativity. A collective of art spaces and art programming, HART is dedicated to the facilitation of cultural dialogue, collaboration and new possibilities for art creation, and to that end supports and enables Hong Kong’s creative community through diverse and extensive exhibition, event, workshop, artist atelier and salon programming. 

HART is committed to nurturing local talent and acting as a platform for innovation, inspiration and cross-pollination among the creative sectors. As a key player in establishing a robust art ecosystem in Hong Kong and ensuring the next generation of artists and art lovers are supported and championed, HART’s programming extends to community-based arts education and outreach for the under-resourced groups in Hong Kong. Each year HART is dedicated to providing social studio space for around 20 artists and makers, organising Curatorship Incubation Program for young curators or students, HART Haus showcase, and respective art workshops and programs arranged by our artists and makers of all disciplines for all ages in the local communities.
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