Outdoor Art to See in Hong Kong This Spring

This month, just before Art Basel Hong Kong begins, an array of artworks — some towering, some glowing, another harking back to old Hong Kong — will pop up outside the walls of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center.

Five of these new, large-scale works were commissioned by a department of Hong Kong’s government for its outdoor art project, “Art@Harbour,” the harbor being Victoria Harbor, which separates Hong Kong Island from the Kowloon Peninsula.

Another piece was jointly commissioned by M+, Hong Kong’s contemporary art museum, and Art Basel Hong Kong. That work, a new black-and-white film by the Chinese artist and filmmaker Yang Fudong, “Sparrow on the Sea,” will be projected on the museum’s facade nightly.

One of the “Art@Harbour” projects, “Schrödinger’s Bed,” is by the Hong Kong artist Dylan Kwok.

Mr. Kwok’s work is named after Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment by the theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger.

That experiment, which the scientist proposed as a commentary on quantum mechanics, suggests that, if a cat is inside a sealed box with something which may kill it, it is impossible to know whether the cat is alive or dead until you observe the cat. So, until you open the box, the cat is at once both dead and alive.

Mr. Kwok explained by email that his installation, in Tamar Park, a waterfront green space in the Admiralty district, “consists of nine futuristic daybeds that are placed in a tic-tac-toe alignment. Six inflatable cats in checkerboard patterns are (randomly) seated or lay on six daybeds out of the total of nine.” These outdoor couches are programmed to glow in differing patterns from 6 p.m. to midnight, he added, to surprise visitors sitting on them.