Hong Kong-born artist Bo Choy's video, sound, and performance work stages historical apparitions in urban environments to reflect on the politics of memory and place.
Read MoreBorn in Hong Kong, Bo Choy studied at the Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, completing her MFA in Fine Art Media in 2020.
Centred on her native Hong Kong, Bo Choy's interventions across video, sound, and performance reflect on history and the spirit of place through poetics, mythology, and theatrics.
With a focus on Hong Kong and its socio-political developments, Choy's work often looks to mythology and folklore traditions from the Far East to draw the spirit of the city as it faces political upheaval, notably from historical disagreement.
Starting with the 2016 film un/folding in, in which the artist is sent a box of seemingly disparate objects by her mother, Choy has explored how memory and history imprints on present and the future, leaving residual traces of past events.
Choy's belief in a universal interconnectedness, or a collective consciousness, is informed by eastern philosophy and psychoanalyst Carl Jung's notions of the Self, both of which have guided the artist's 'quest to search for truth ... in a society where lies and rumours' dominate.
Evoking lost traditions and Hong Kong's past, a masked, white-robed spirit is seen walking through the city's traffic-heavy streets in the video work War of Perception 感知戰爭 (2020), while protestors dance around in plastic ponchos, balaclavas, and goggles.
Alluding to the city's uncertain future, the work was presented amid the pro-democracy protests in the city as China threatened to take back control, generating mass anxiety around governance and freedom of expression.
Through sound and image, Choy has called her work a 'conduit' of sorts, connecting different worlds and revealing realities that may elude our immediate awareness. However, Choy's poetic work is never ascriptive, but rather seeks to raise open-ended questions.
For Sad Leaders, a 2020 performance at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, four performers wear frowning masks of well-known political figures—Margaret Thatcher, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Chris Patten—while performing a mourning ritual of personal and collective grievances to a two-part soundtrack.
The self-composed soundtrack, which is first dramatic before veering to the comic, generated an atemporal space by which the historically abhorred were given another face, tying into broader questions of empathy, power, and political theatre.
During the 2020 pandemic, Choy moved back to Hong Kong, which made her more aware of the social, structural, and environmental changes facing the city. Yet while the 'old world' seemed to be dying, there seemed to be something preventing the birth of the 'new'.
In a performance from the same year, Gau Wu Oi Ming 鳩嗚哀鳴, which the artist translates to 'crying randomly and sadly', a man standing in a smoke-filled street holding a protective umbrella is projected on the gallery walls before being refracted against the artist's mirrored robe, the image falling upon the audience.
The term gau wu, which refers to 'shopping' in Mandarin, had become a metaphor for protest in 2014 after an anti-democracy campaigner told a reporter she was protesting for the right to 'gau wu'. Following the clearance of the pro-democracy Occupy movement, and politician CY Leung's urging for shoppers to return, the same protestors resumed their posts as 'shoppers'.
Bo Choy is the 2020 recipient of the Clare Winsten Memorial Prize and the 2016 Chelsea Arts Club Acme Studio Award.
Bo Choy's works have been shown widely in Europe, Asia, and the U.K.
Solo and group exhibitions and performances include South London Gallery (2021); Barbican Arts Trust Project Space, London (2020); Bloomsbury Theatre, London (2020); Auto Italia, London (2018); and 6th Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece (2017).
The artist's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
