Leung Chi Wo

Situated north of Venice’s main island in Italy, Murano is world-renowned for its glass making. For this installation, Hong Kong artist Leung Chi Wo has collected vintage Venetian glass lamps which have been used at various homes and places in Italy from the late 19th century to the 1970s.The flickering light emitted through the vintage Venetian glass together with the sound track recorded by the artist in Venice in September 2023, of waves hitting on the docks of Murano in the background, represents a transcendental meeting across times and geographies. These chandeliers are much more than a display of history or art objects with quotidian traces, they bear the memories and experiences of the past.

“Past-Future Tense” is Leung Chi Wo’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, continuing his articulation of an unprescribed history of Hong Kong across time. Leung’s recent research into the colonial history of Hong Kong introduces a new anchor point set in the year 1982 when negotiations commenced between the Chinese and British governments with regards to the handover of Hong Kong, prompting an unpredictable future for the city.

“Something There and Never There” is the solo exhibition of Leung Chi Wo, centred around the tumultuous year of 1967 in Hong Kong. By using diverse media including photography, video, and installations comprising of found images, music and objects from 1967, Leung performs a deep engagement with a subjective history through archival research, conceptual intervention and poetic re-imagination.

The words “Extremely Recalcitrant” came from a comment by Magistrate Enoch Light, describing the 14 Belilios schoolgirls who were charged for obstructing police officers or trespassing on school property during the 1967 riots in Hong Kong. The girls had been excluded from the court for being “unruly and disrespectful” (as reported in the South China Morning Post, Nov 18, 1967).

In the seminal book On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag also sees reality as “recalcitrant”. She writes, “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.”

A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) is the last film directed by Charlie Chaplin. With Hong Kong as its backdrop, this romantic comedy was set during the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution in China. Although the film had little box office success, its theme song This Is My Song, written by Chaplin and recorded by Petula Clark, reached No. 1 in the UK charts and became a worldwide hit.

Frater is a sculptural installation comprising of a used Japanese-made Brother DB2-B755-3 sewing machine found in a second-hand shop on Tai Yau Street. The artist has manipulated the machine such that its power punching stroke is slowed down to one stroke per minute. Instead of sewing fabric, the machine pierces in very slow motion. A track of holes on a roll of exposed and developed black and white negative film with images of artificial roses. One cycle of this pierced film runs for about 10 hours, the usual length of a workday spent by the artist’s father in the factory. The work is effectively turned into a timepiece.

Drawing from the artist’s personal recollection, this model of sewing machine, the most popular during the golden age of the Hong Kong garment industry in the 1960s and 1970s, was the most valuable possession in his family, which allowed his mother to work at home for additional earnings while looking after her children. The artist’s father also sewed with a machine of the same model in a large garment factory in Tai Yau Street in Kowloon, where, situated next to it was an artificial flower factory. It was the site of a major labour dispute that marked the beginning of a series of anti-colonial riots in 1967.

Leung Chi Wo captured the variably colourful surface of the Victoria Harbour in different seasons and times of the day, recording the temporal and mnemonic impressions unperceivable by the naked eye.

Music in 1967 series illustrates the artist’s cross-discipline practice that is often based on extensive research concerning cultural identities, social and political phenomenon, belief system and the ambivalence of history. A collection of light boxes and photo installations consisting of images, texts and sound, the series is inspired by the 1967 anti-colonial riots backed by the communists in Hong Kong. The Beatles’ songs make a faint backdrop to the works, which recalls Western pop music being played in public spaces by the government during the riots to counter Chinese communist propaganda broadcasted on the streets.

After his eponymous solo exhibition “Press the Button… Leung Chi Wo: A Survey Exhibition” at OCAT Shenzhen in 2015, Leung created 54 hand drawings along with textual description for each of the works showcased at the exhibition. An art book titled Press the Button was published after. With limited edition of 50, each individually numbered box set includes an 88-page paperback and 54 loose hand drawings, with texts by Leung Chi Wo, curator of the exhibition Carol Yinghua Lu, art critic Anthony Leung Po Shan and curator Qu Chang.

Before Sunrise, is a set of 6 photographs that documents the artist’s response to Yoko Ono’s performance Morning Peace. Commissioned by MOMA and organised by M+ Museum, Morning Peace is 24-hour durational piece across 8 different cities globally to “celebrate the mornings of past, future, and now”. Set to the accompaniment of Im Abendrot (At Sunset), one of the Four Last Songs Richard Strauss wrote before his death, Leung Chi Wo and attending audience in Hong Kong witnessed together the twilight of sunrise.

An imaginative investigation through staged photography, He was lost yesterday and we found him today is a series of 28 self portraits in which Leung Chi Wo collaborated with Sara Wong. The series re-enact anonymous figures picked out from images in archival materials such as old magazines, newspaper, pamphlets, souvenir books and other documents that they have been collecting over the years.

Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong’s collaboration started in 1992. Their previous work City Cookie was exhibited in Shanghai Biennale, Venice Biennale, as well as Queens Museum in the USA and Museum of Image and Sound in Brazil.

Colour Series is a body of photographic work that employs a dual process of both conventional and digital imaging. It traces Leung Chi Wo’s visitations across five different cities: New York, Melbourne, Venice , Shanghai and Hong Kong. Executed in 1998 to 2003, these photographs of skyscrapers are captured within their dense urban surrounding from a low- angle shot. Their monolithic facades rise up like walls to encase our vision towards the jagged sky above.