M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2023 applications & looking back at Emily Verla Bovino’s talk

See our latest updates on the M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2023 programme. Since 2015, the M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship programme has supported original research projects investigating issues relating to design and architecture in Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and Asia through a transnational lens. Applicants of the fellowship should engage in advanced research on historical or contemporary topics related to either a single discipline (such as architecture, graphic design, industrial design, and urbanism) or cross-disciplinary developments, taking into consideration the region’s cultural, social, economic, and political conditions as well as its international and cross-cultural knowledge networks. The deadline for submission is 26 September 2022.

With the physical opening of the museum, the M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship 2023 continues to support two fellowship projects yet with different focuses. The first fellowship supports a Hong Kong—based researcher’s original enquiry on topics specifically derived from M+ Collection Archives related to design and architecture. The second fellowship supports a researcher or practitioner engaged in historical or practice-based research that contributes to expanding the knowledge of the methods, processes, and impact of design and architectural practices in or across Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and Asia. More details can be found through here. 

Looking back at M+/ Design Trust Research Fellowship Public Talk “Miniature as Method? Vanishing Acts in Trans-scalar Hong Kong” by Emily Verla Bovino on July 22nd 2022, Emily sees the indie art toys, model bus collectibles, and mini-iterations of disappearing streetscapes in Hong Kong more than smallness, which offer ways of rethinking the city it represents through the shifts in scale that it enacts. Reducing and enlarging, absorbing and distancing, mobilising and capturing, miniature generates images that captivate and enchant while pointing to questions of labour, information, and power in the urban environment of one of late capitalism’s 'model' cities within a global context. The discussion among Emily, artists Nadim Abbas and Michelle Chan Wan Chee, and moderator Sunny Cheung reflected upon the collaborative network established through this research project, and expanded on how to theorize the miniature in the specific context of Hong Kong as well as the curatorial potentials it unveils for the future.