Buildings of a city reveal one's memories. Old houses are the most intriguing buildings from the past because they used to be homes, where memories and traces of the life of past inhabitants allow later generations to glimpse into the good old days. They are channels to go back in time and hold a piece of history that encompasses us all. In a contemporary context, art can give old houses a new lease of life, and help foster local cultural memory and community empathy. The value of a house is not in the space built to live in; it is in the extension of the spirit of its inhabitants.

Organised by the Art Promotion Office, ‘Hi! Houses' is an art project set out to re-think the use of space in old houses. The project has chosen four century-old historic buildings in Hong Kong, namely the Dr Sun Yat-sen Museum, Old House at Wong Uk Village, Law Uk Folk Museum and Sam Tung Uk Museum and commissioned four local artists, Wilson Shieh, Lam Tung-pang, Fiona Wong and Jaffa Lam, to lead their teams to create site-specific artworks to inject new life into them. The artists apply their idiosyncratic visual lingo to project how the past inhabitants lived and what stories they had in the old houses.

To know more about the project, please visit the Facebook fan page of 'Hi! Houses'.