In Central Yards, a Hong Kong pedestrian route linking the Central business district to the Central Ferry Piers, French architect and artist Emmanuelle Moureaux has installed a five-year countdown as spatial structure: 100 colors no.54 “FLOW,” a permanent installation completed in 2026. Rather than marking a single moment, the piece runs six suspended years in sequence, turning a daily commute into a passage through time not yet arrived. It is the latest chapter in a series Moureaux has been building for over a decade
Suspended numbers carry the installation’s logic: vertical lines trace the years 2027, 2028, 2029, 2030, 2031, and 2032, each rendered in Moureaux’s signature palette. These are not fixed dates so much as a timeline caught mid-motion — moments that emerge, overlap, and fade as pedestrians move beneath them, so that no two crossings of the space read quite the same way. It stands out among public art installations in Hong Kong for measuring a five-year horizon rather than marking a single moment.
The Tokyo years shaped the thinking behind the work. Moureaux is a Tokyo-based architect and artist who has lived in the city since 1996, and its layered visual noise still anchors her practice. “When I first arrived in Tokyo, I was fully fascinated by the colors overflowing on the street,” she says of the experience that redirected her career, describing the store signs, cables, and glimpses of sky that convinced her, in her words, to relocate permanently.
That formative encounter produced shikiri — a concept, borrowed from the Japanese term for dividing space with sliding screens, that Moureaux redefined as using color as a three-dimensional element to divide and shape space rather than decorate a surface. It has underpinned every entry in her 100 colors series since it began in 2013, including her 2025 installation along Tokyo’s Takanawa Gateway, where the same color logic met an entirely different urban rhythm.
Color as volume, not finish, is the operating premise. For Moureaux, color is not applied to surfaces but used as a three-dimensional element to shape space itself — the basis of what could be called a three-dimensional color installation, distinct from more conventional public art, where color usually sits on top of an already-resolved architecture rather than generating the spatial experience on its own.
Shifting perspectives change what the installation shows. As visitors move through Central Yards in Hong Kong, colors gather, expand, and dissolve depending on where a person stands and how fast they walk, so the piece behaves less like a static object and more like a responsive environment layered onto one of the city’s busiest pedestrian routes.
A three-decade practice sits behind the Hong Kong installation. Moureaux’s built and installed work spans sculptural entrances for Google’s headquarters, architectural design for Sugamo Shinkin Bank, installations for UNIQLO and ISSEY MIYAKE, and Forest of Numbers at The National Art Center, Tokyo — a body of work that urdesign has covered extensively over the years, tracking how the shikiri principle recurs across radically different scales and briefs.
Why Central Yards matters as a site is less about spectacle than repetition: commuters will pass through it daily, not once. Moureaux’s own account of the wider 100 colors project frames that repeated encounter as the point — “please come and find your favorite color,” she has said of the series, an invitation aimed less at visitors seeking a single photograph of 100 colors no.54 “FLOW” than at people willing to return.
A slow countdown closes the installation’s logic: by the time it reaches 2032, 100 colors no.54 “FLOW” will have quietly aged alongside everyone who has walked beneath it — the six suspended years never resolving into a single present, only ever handing off to the next one.
100 colors no.54 “FLOW” by Emmanuelle Moureaux | Where: Central Yards, Central, Hong Kong — When: 2026 (permanent installation)