Around the half-year mark is typically a good time to pause, revisit and reflect on the past six months, to take stock of our personal and professional progress. I like to imagine it as sitting in the middle carriage of an MTR train, where, if you stand in the centre, once you hit a straight stretch, you can look both forwards and backwards, a metaphorical past and future yawning ahead of and behind you. Are we still on track with the goals we confidently set in January, did we peter out somewhere around March, or have we given ourselves grace and pivoted to more achievable targets that don’t make us want to tear our hair out?

Progress and innovation are not just measured in months. Certain projects and inventions take years, if not decades, to bear fruit. Robotics, for example, is making major leaps. Machines once intended to save human time and labour are now becoming part of human leisure, too. It’s almost impossible to avoid seeing the antics of androids on social media: they are running half-marathons and kung fu kicking their way to relevance. Now, robots are even taking the stage.

Sophia, the social humanoid robot, just gave her first-ever classical music performance, right here in Hong Kong. Is she putting living, breathing divas to shame? Well, not quite, but she is certainly paving the way for other music-making machines to come. Managing editor David Ho finds out how a robotics company and a university put their heads together for a collaboration that rethinks the boundaries of music.

Continuing the theme of innovation, Aaina Bhargava heads to Taichung to explore the growing convergence of libraries, archives and museums as an architectural model, and how the rise of such hybrid spaces challenges the traditional notion of siloed cultural institutions.

If ever there was a tale that better illustrates how radical optimism can change the future than the one of Innocent and Chihiro Mutanga’s lives, well, we have yet to hear it. Hei Kiu Au speaks to the founders of the Africa Centre Hong Kong about bridging divides, staying the course in the face of discrimination and love being the greatest superpower of all.

For Wallace Chan, jewellery designer extraordinaire, it is never too late to think about tomorrow – or start over. With his 70th birthday just past, the artist turns his gaze towards sculpting at a monumental scale. Cheung Hok-hang traces Chan’s daily commute between his workshops in Hong Kong and Zhuhai to see how he approaches his practice.