Tai Kwun | Open the Box 2026: Pleasant Place with Ryan Villamael

Description

Artist: Ryan Villamael  

Curated by Veronica Wong

with Associate Curator Christy Chow and Coordinator Vanessa Wong
A quiet garden,

a floating island,

a hidden nest,

a place that lives on in memory.

Open the Box 2026: Pleasant Place with Ryan Villamael is a slow-growing, participatory programme. Participants of all ages are invited to co-create a paper canopy that evolves over time – formed by multi-level suspended clusters that together become a shared, collective landscape. 

Pleasant Place belongs to the Filipino artist Ryan Villamael’s ongoing Locus Amoenus series. In Latin, locus amoenus describes a “pleasant place” – a dreamlike pastoral landscape of refuge, abundance and harmony. This series explores history and collective memory, looking at the interpenetrating layers that constitute a locality and the invisible threads that connect us to it.

Participants are invited to wander through this immersive, forest-like environment, moving beneath and around floating foliage while actively contributing to the work’s growth. Through workshops, they will create clusters of leaves, vines or abstract terrain fragments, assembling small landscapes that reflect their own interpretation of a “pleasant place.”

It is a shared refuge shaped by many hands – a network of stories connected by migration and ideas of belonging.