Luke Ching Chin Wai

Quarantine Hotel (2021) is an installation of objects and slideshow of images from the artist’s recent 21-day quarantine in Hong Kong, where in purgatory idleness the artist turns his chamber into a temporary camera obscura, projecting the off-limit outside world into an interior landscape.

“I am very afraid of cockroaches. I started using double-sided tape to make cockroaches around 20 years ago, when I was in school. Because of my fear, I never considered the anatomy or physiology of the cockroaches, let alone studying and drawing them from life. Their details are thus completely fabricated by me, borne out of my imagination of that which I fear, with some characteristics amplified, some non-existent, all in all a distant association with the object of fear. If compared to real cockroaches, they are not mimetic copies, but rather an analogue of our daily sensation of fear …… Of course, in this time and space, the title is also a response to the police’s calling protestors “cockroaches”. ”  — Luke Ching Chin Wai

Usagi and Dark Night, White Cloud came out of Ching’s week-long stint as an undercover security guard in 2013, part of his ongoing Undercover Worker project in which he takes up different grassroot jobs to make first-hand observations and develop alternative labour campaigns to improve these working conditions. The chair movement, where he successfully petitioned for the Museum of Art, the UA cinema and other retailers to install chairs for their security and service staff, is an example of that.

Usagi consists of multiple channels of surveillance camera footage when the artist took his first night shift at a semi-conductor factory in Tai Po in 2013, which coincided with Super Typhoon Usagi’s approach to Hong Kong. The observatory hoisted the No.8 Typhoon signal, and all other staff hastily left the factory grounds. The security guard thus wandered alone around his unfamiliar surrounding, acquainting himself with the camera locations and angles. He accidentally came across a spider building a web in front of the camera, its web almost undetectable until the spider scuttles across. Like a spider web, the typhoon is also invisible, and its phenomena perceivable only through the moving shadows of the tree trunks. Similarly, in today’s context, the veracity of events is often validated through the lens of surveillance cameras.

Ching had a five-day job at the Hong Kong Railway Museum. The artist took longer-than-usual patrols across the museum premise, and unbeknownst to his colleagues and supervisor, created Dark Night, White Cloud, a series of photos inside the train carriage exhibits. With a long-exposure photographic process, he waved about in his blue uniform, creating the illusion of a translucent cloud that levitates above the seats. Dematerializing the human body that performs caretaking labour, this work is a magical realist intervention to an otherwise stale and unmoving artefacts in the spirit of Institutional Critique.