The Tree of Knowledge is a monumental 14-metre-high permanent banner installation, spanning all five floors of the main staircase in the Au Shue Hung Memorial Library at Hong Kong Baptist University. Commissioned by HKBU chief librarian Ian Chang, in consultation with head of library resource discovery Lolita Kwok, the project involved a team of HKBU student data entry clerks, who compiling an exhaustive database of academic disciplines.

 

Reimagining the classic ‘tree of knowledge’ as a vast, foam-like constellation of over 200,000 bubbles in shades of blue and green, each bubble represents a discipline, subdiscipline, or field of study. Organised according to standard library classification systems (Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress principles), the bubbles cluster and overlap to form an interconnected, non-hierarchical landscape, drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s metaphor of knowledge as ‘foam,’ where spheres of understanding coexist, touch, and co-fragile in a dynamic, polyspheric network rather than a rigid trunk-and-branches structure.

 

Inspired by historical models, such as Porphyry’s Tree, Ramon Llull’s Arbre de ciència, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, and the Dewey system—the composition captures the explosive growth of modern knowledge production and the rise of interdisciplinary fields. Accompanied by an interactive website (library.hkbu.edu.hk/TreeOfKnowledge) for digital exploration, the banner transforms the library staircase into a living visual essay on the organisation, diversification, and interconnectedness of human understanding in an AI-accelerated era.

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