Premieres 21 Jul 2025
In English
Available on Spotify and Apple
In collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong, as part of the exhibition ‘Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs’ (2025), Afterall has initiated a series of conversations with artists, curators and scholars. The exhibition reframes Ha’s motherboards from functional tools to aesthetic objects. We depart from Ha’s unconventional printing practice to generate new interpretations and intergenerational conversations, extending from Hong Kong to the world beyond.
This podcast is produced by Arianna Mercado and co-edited by Elisa Adami, Wing Chan, Adeena Mey and David Morris.
Episode 1 (21 Jul 2025)
Afterall × Para Site: Reframing Strangeness with Michelle Wun Ting Wong
In this first episode, Afterall editors Elisa Adami and Wing Chan talk to the exhibition’s curator Michelle Wun Ting Wong. We explore how the materials the motherboards are made of can become an index to read Hong Kong’s history from the 1970s and its changing landscape.
Episode 2 (17 Aug 2025)
Afterall × Para Site: Reframing Strangeness with Grace Samboh and Ruhaeni Intan
Our second episode in the series is with Grace Samboh and Ruhaeni Intan from the Yogyakarta based collective Hyphen—. Founded in 2011, Hyphen— is a research initiative that puts forward curiosity and common wellbeing as the estuary of artistic practices. Their work is most often focussed on practices from and in Indonesia, bringing historical legacies into dialogue with contemporary concerns, work that has taken various forms, from exhibitions and publications to jam sessions and radio broadcasts. For this episode, Grace and Intan are in conversation with Afterall research fellow and editor David Morris. We explore how their work as part of Hyphen— extends some of the questions of ‘Reframing Strangeness’ on different practices of history: How and why do we remember? How are creative legacies cared for, carried and brought into the present?
Episode 3 (29 Sep 2025)
Afterall × Para Site: Reframing Strangeness with Mike Fok
Ha Bik Chuen was known as a collector and hoarder of all sorts of things such as books, photographs, and documents, to name but these. Reflecting on the drive of collectors and hoarders and in an associative move that expands from Ha to other collecting practices in Hong Kong, Afterall editor Adeena Mey speaks with Hong Kong-based collector and consultant Mike Fok about his lifelong passion for Yixing teapots and Chinese tea culture in our third and last episode of ‘Reframing Strangeness’. Mike shares how his journey began more than twenty years ago, when a taste of aged pu’er tea sparked his curiosity. The search for good tea soon led him to teaware, and eventually to the world of Yixing clay teapots—renowned for their craftsmanship and unique brewing qualities.
He recalls starting out in Hong Kong’s markets and on early online platforms, before realising that much of the best material had already been collected in the 1980s and ’90s. His quest took him further afield, to mainland China, Japan and Thailand, where he encountered antique teapots and learned from handling real examples. For Mike, using teapots daily—washing, touching and brewing—is the key to understanding their qualities, much like testing different sound systems with music, a learning process akin to how Ha taught himself to make motherboards through tactile experiences.
The discussion also touches on the rise of younger tea drinkers, the spread of tea culture through Instagram, and the growing global interest in both tea and teaware. Along the way, Mike offers advice for beginners, stories from his own collecting, and insights into how teapots connect history, craft and everyday life.
