The Light Within the Light Without is a 7-minute looping immersive artwork divided into four chapters. The experience journeys kaleidoscopically through the past, present, future, craft, art, and resonance of Neon in Hong Kong.

The creation of immersive projected artworks is a fundamentally collaborative process. It brings together multiple technical and creative disciplines in deep symbiosis. Animators, editors, video designers, curators, writers, lighting designers, composers, sound designers, and producers all contribute their artistic and artisanal skills to an iterative process of accretion and refinement. The development of The Light Within the Light Without has been shaped by a wonderful standing wave of discovery—revealing the deep resonance between our emerging art form and the ever-evolving layers of art and craft that inform the creation of Neon.

Inspired by the passion and knowledge of our collaborators at Tetra Neon Exchange and their wider family of master craftsmen, artists, technicians, academics, sign owners, and lovers of Neon, this creation has been an odyssey of exploration into the evolution of Neon as a key visual language in the physical, cinematic, imagined, remembered, and incipient cityscape of Hong Kong.

59 Productions has long been fascinated by the organic, memetic evolution of public-realm aesthetic languages, creating works that explore the layers of meaning that accrete in our shared landscapes and understandings. This fascination, combined with our extensive work in the medium of projected light—through which we have told and reframed the stories of some of the world’s most significant architecture, including the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Sydney Opera House, and the United Nations building in New York—comes together fruitfully in this project.

As a continuation of this practice, we are delighted to invite you into the glowing light of neon and an emotional exploration of the shared lineage of neon sign-making, calligraphy, advertising, and wayfinding that has seeped into the representation of Hong Kong as a truly global city.