Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Artist Emmanuelle Moureaux has brought her signature chromatic language across the harbor to Hong Kong for the first time with 100 colors no.54 FLOW. Suspended above a bank of escalators at Central Yards, a mixed-use waterfront development connecting IFC Mall to the Central Ferry Piers, the installation transforms a temporary pedestrian bridge into a vivid passage through time and color.
The site is filled with roughly 4,000 handcrafted numerals arranged in Moureaux’s signature 100-color palette. As the 54th work in her ongoing 100 Colors series, which she began in 2013, FLOW also marks her first major artistic intervention in Hong Kong.
Emmanuelle Moureaux brings her signature 100 Colors series to Hong Kong with FLOW, a vibrant installation suspended above Central Yards.
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Moureaux, a French-born architect who has lived and worked in Tokyo since the mid-1990s, developed this approach through a personal philosophy she calls shikiri. The term draws from the Japanese practice of dividing space with sliding screens. Moureaux reinterprets the concept by using color itself to divide and construct space rather than simply applying it to a surface.
Rather than capturing a single moment, the installation visualizes the years 2027 through 2032 across six vertical, overlapping timelines. Each numeral hangs at a slightly different depth, creating layers that shift depending on where viewers stand. Consequently, no two vantage points offer quite the same composition.
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Central Yards
Moureaux designed FLOW to make the passage of time visible. Instead of treating a year as a fixed point, she presents time as something constantly moving, overlapping, and disappearing. As commuters travel along the escalators beneath the installation, the density of color changes with them. From one angle, the numerals appear densely packed; from another, they separate into distinct layers, gathering and dissolving overhead like a spectrum in motion.
As commuters move beneath the permanent installation, their changing viewpoints reveal new layers of numbers, colors, and connections to the passage of time.
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
For FLOW, Moureaux looked beyond her own artistic language and toward Hong Kong’s distinctive energy. She describes the city through its intersecting horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, which create an intensified sense of movement as their paths converge.
Those directions also appear within the installation. The vertical numerals echo Hong Kong’s towering skyline, while the horizontal movement of commuters reflects the constant pulse of pedestrian traffic below. Meanwhile, the diagonals reference the movement of the harbor between Kowloon and Central.
Photo: Central Yards
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
At ground level, individually colored letters spelling “Central Yards” provide another visual anchor. Together, they connect the suspended sequence of numbers to the development below while reinforcing the relationship between the artwork and its surroundings.
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Central Yards
The location also gives the installation a temporal significance of its own. Central Yards is scheduled to complete Phase 1 in 2027 and Phase 2 in 2032, precisely matching the first and final years represented in Moureaux’s suspended timelines.
As a result, FLOW is not an installation designed for a single photograph. Thousands of commuters will pass beneath it each day, and each person’s experience will depend on their position, movement, and perspective. The work changes as its audience moves through it.
The artwork uses roughly 4,000 colorful numerals to visualize the years 2027 through 2032 across six overlapping timelines.
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Central Yards
Moureaux encourages viewers to encounter the installation gradually, even over repeated visits. Rather than taking in the entire spectrum at once, she hopes people will notice a different color each day and associate it with the possibility of a brighter future.
Ultimately, FLOW extends the central idea behind Moureaux’s practice: color can transform the way people experience space and time. In the rush of everyday life, color can easily become background. Here, however, Moureaux brings it into the foreground, creating an immersive environment meant to be experienced not only visually, but physically as people move through it.
Inspired by Hong Kong’s skyline, harbor, and constant pedestrian movement, Moureaux transforms the city’s intersecting lines into a shifting composition of color and form.
Photo: Central Yards
Photo: Hiroaki Zenke
Photo: Central Yards
