Overview
When was the last time you made a birthday card for someone, and when was the last time you received one?
Architect and artist Hikoko’s Happy Birthday Likeboxes art installation is comprised of 366 illuminated mailboxes, each representing a birthday in a year. The appearance is inspired by the social media posts, and the name “Likeboxes” draws reference to the act of “liking” a social media post, while also playing on the similar-sounding word Lightboxes.
Through Hikoko’s art installation, you can receive a hand-drawn birthday card from a previous visitor and then you are invited to create a birthday card of your own for another visitor. May you also transmit blessings to others as you receive them. These cards symbolize invitations from the artists, encouraging you to co-create a unique birthday card where the old and new merge together. The work Happy Birthday Likeboxes is on display in the exhibition “Beyond Blessings: Birthday Greetings for the Master of Chih Lo Lou”. Through her work, Hikoko encourages visitors to reflect on the impersonal nature of copy-and-paste, one-click, and forward-to-all messages that inundate social media platforms on a daily basis, and at the same time send the sincerest and warmest blessings.
Hikoko Ito is a Hong Kong architect-turned artist. Since 2012, she has joined her father (artist Sun Chan) to explore new visual representations of Chinese characters, and has exhibited works both in Hong Kong and abroad.
Hikoko’s decorative & encrypted Chinese character patterns traverse the boundaries between image and text, and manifested in various media such as prints, wall art, and a collection of scarves and apparels by an international brand. Recently, Hikoko further transformed her patterns into 3D works ranging from furniture, art-installations to large-scale public art, which had won her multiple awards.