Elemental postcards

At Ancestral Fortune, visitors are given a worksheet upon the entrance. The worksheet has two parts. One is science fiction. The other is a personality test. Both of them are based on the Five Elements theory, the core idea of the exhibition.
A worksheet in this article is written and made online by Alice Sparkly Kat, an astrologer and author of Postcolonial Astrology. The initial plan of the worksheet was conceived as a means to talk about astrology based on The Five Elements theory in Ancestral Fortune. As the programmer of the exhibition, I wanted the worksheet to be more interactive than only a curatorial text or a floor plan explaining what visitors saw in the exhibition. In fact, the worksheet didn’t explain the artworks in the exhibition. Instead, it was another artwork with which visitors interacted.

At the exhibition, visitors could choose to read the story first, or do the test first, or alternate between the two. The sequence of both the story and the test is the same as that of the Five Elements theory, which is
Wood > Fire > Earth > Metal > Water.

At the end of the test, visitors could find out which element they were. Then visitors could ask hosts of the exhibition to tell them what their element meant for their personality. The information that the hosts told visitors was later put into a form of a postcard given out to visitors of the exhibition as a souvenir. The interaction between the hosts and the visitors was meant to be a conversation starter.

Written by Alice Sparkly Kat
Dutch translation by Hesret Emine
Designed by Wanwai Shum
Curated by Honey Kraiwee