Overview
When was the last time you received a hand-drawn birthday card, or crafted one for someone else?
Relive this joy with Happy Birthday Likeboxes in Sunlight, an enchanting art installation by artist and architect Hikoko Ito. Through your “Birthday Likebox”, you'll be gifted a hand-drawn birthday card from a previous visitor. In return, you are invited to embrace this generous spirit of giving by creating a birthday card for a future visitor, passing on blessings just as you received them.
This installation features 366 illuminated mailboxes, each representing a day of the year. Their appearance, reminiscent of social media posts, along with the ingeniously named “Likeboxes” - a play on 'liking' a post and lightboxes - prompt visitors to contemplate the often-impersonal nature of social media interactions, and to instead create and share a hand-drawn birthday card infused with sincere, heartfelt wishes.
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.