In Australia, Hong Kong-Born Artists Tell Stories of Longing and Lament
Generations of diaspora artists are brought together in Canberra to reveal that migration has always been a part of Hong Kong's story.
Exhibition view: Assembly, CIW Gallery, Australian Centre on China in the World, Canberra (12 February–24 May 2024). Courtesy CIW Gallery.
On the evening of 15 February 2024, artist and musician Chun Yin Rainbow Chan took to the stage at the Australian Centre on China in the World Gallery in Canberra.
Chan positioned herself in front of her installation Fruit Song (2022)—a pair of large silk panels painted with images of pineapples, mangoes, and other produce—and burst into song.
She performed a traditional bridal lament, which young women in Hong Kong's historic walled villages would sing before their arranged marriages as they prepared to start a new life with a stranger. Chan sang in Weitou, a Cantonese dialect now spoken by few people, with an English translation printed on the wall to help audiences follow along.
The lyrics tell of a woman railing against being forced to leave her family, using imagery of fruit to describe her pain. 'Longans are dismantled by the howling wind,' the song begins, and later, 'Mandarin is torn from all her sisters.'
Chan's performance marked the opening of Assembly (12 February–24 May 2024), an exhibition of work by eight diaspora artists from Hong Kong—Chan, Firenze Lai Ching Yin, Nikki Lam, Pamela Leung, Cyrus Tang, Hiram To, Howie Tsui Ho Yan, and John Young—who have settled around the world.
Hong Kong emigrants have made international headlines over the last few years as hundreds of thousands of residents left the city following a period of social unrest in 2019. More than 290,000 relocated in 2023 alone.
Perhaps surprisingly, Assembly is not focused on this recent wave of immigration. Instead, it brings together artists from different generations of the Hong Kong diaspora, some of whom left the city decades ago, to reveal that migration has always been part of the city's story.
John Young was born in 1956 and emigrated in 1967, when his parents sent him to school in Sydney, while the youngest participant, lament-singer Chan, was born in 1990 and left at the age of six.
It is thanks to the constant toing and froing of residents throughout the centuries that Hong Kong has become the place it is today: a complex, cosmopolitan melting pot of languages, cultures, and traditions. 'Migration is really a prism through which you can understand Hong Kong,' explains Assembly curator Olivier Krischer.
Like Hong Kong itself, Assembly is densely packed and hyper-stimulating. When visitors step through the entrance, they are immediately confronted with Cyrus Tang's grayscale three-channel video In memory's eye, we travel (2016); Agglomerate (2022) by Pamela Leung, a floor sculpture made of crocheted Chinese-language newspapers; and multiple prints and photographs by Hiram To.
It can be difficult to find a common thread between these disparate artists and works, but that is the point. There is no single migrant story or feature that defines Hongkongers. 'Assembly is really interested in the diversity of experience,' says Krischer.
![Hiram To, Higher [Dior- or Di] (2002, printed 2015). Photographic print mounted on acrylic. 175 x 63 cm.](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/Content/Insights/2024/Assembly%20Canberra/HIRAM-TOHigherDior-or-Di2005_1200_0.jpg)
To's four pieces in the exhibition capture this idea, exploring events, ideas, and places as varied as the British colonisation of Australia in 1788, the fetishisation of East Asian people in advertising, and the Peak Tram in Hong Kong.
Several other works directly reference Hong Kong, illustrating how the city haunts people long after they've left. Hanging high on the wall, just below the ceiling, is Leung's sculpture Ngor yiu fan uk kei (2022). The Cantonese phrase means 'I want to go home' and is spelt out in red neon. Leung's use of Cantonese points specifically to Hong Kong, as does her medium of neon, referencing the hundreds of thousands of neon signs that once proliferated in the city's streets.
Around the corner, Nikki Lam's video the unshakable destiny_2101 (2021) alludes to the work of legendary filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, whose work defines a particular Hong Kong aesthetic, but who is himself an émigré from Shanghai. In Lam's video, set inside a Wong Kar-wai-style interior, the protagonist appears racked with anxiety, raising questions about whether her home is a place of comfort or claustrophobia.
Next to Lam's work, Howie Tsui Ho Yan's handscroll Retainers of Anarchy (2018) depicts the iconic—but now demolished—Kowloon Walled City. The scroll features an imagined cross-section of the tenement block, giving a voyeuristic glimpse at the chaos inside: apartments and businesses are stacked on top of each other, each of them packed with characters inspired by Chinese martial arts novels and films.
Other works, such as Tang's three-channel video In memory's eye, we travel (2016), look beyond Hong Kong to tell universal stories of migration. The video was filmed inside a doll's house made from wax, which Tang slowly melted. Tang filmed the house's disintegration upside down, so viewers have the doubly unnerving experience of watching a home collapse and defying physics as it does.
At one point, a banister detaches from a staircase and arcs towards the ceiling rather than crashing to the floor. The experience of straining to hold onto a memory of a past home and feeling powerless as it disintegrates over time is one that migrants of all backgrounds can identify with.
Similarly, Firenze Lai Ching Yin's paintings could be of almost anyone, anywhere. One of her pieces in Assembly, Betting Station (2013), is a portrait of a man sitting on a brick wall, posed against a moody background that has no distinguishing features. The only clue to the sitter's identity is in the title: he's a gambler, perhaps at Hong Kong's famous Happy Valley Racecourse, watching his horse on the home straight.
After placing a bet, the punter enters a period of limbo: will he lose money or win a fortune? That feeling of possibility and the concurrent fear of loss echoes through Assembly—and underpins the act of migration itself. All migrants take a risk when they move to a new place. At some point in their journey, all find themselves in the shoes of Lai's gambler: staring into the unknown, unsure of what's next, wondering if they made the right bet. —[O]
