Speaking from the Lacuna: Leung Chi-wo's Past-Future Tense

 history is artist Leung Chi-wo’s raw material. Not authoritative “History” with a capital H, but minor histories that have hitherto been overlooked, brushed aside, carelessly buried. In the collaborative work He was lost yesterday and we found him today, Leung and his partner Sara Wong searched for “unidentified minor figures” who were accidentally captured by photographers and entered archives of print media. The artists then imitated their clothing and postures, and restaged their presence for the camera. Rather than attempting to fill in the gap in the archive and write an alternative history, the artists confront the viewers with the mysterious presence of these nameless figures, magnifying the lacuna in the archive in the process.  

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The lacuna is once again evoked by images of the sky in The Date Series, exhibited in Leung’s latest solo “Past-Future Tense”. Twenty four photographs are displayed side by side on one wall, amplifying their visual similarity. Because they are black-and-white, it is not even possible to tell the weather; they could well have been taken at the same location on the same day. Yet the date and location of each shot were meticulously chosen and are central to the meaning of the work: the photographs were taken at sites of violent or disastrous incidents that took place exactly five decades prior. The seemingly irrelevant title of each image is taken from a concurrent celebratory event. For instance, on 26 September, 1970, a gang fight broke out in Sham Shui Po where two young men were stabbed; on the same day, the Pop Folk Concert was held at the Hong Kong Stadium. In 2020, Leung went to the exact location of the bloody incident to take a photo of the sky, and used the concert as the title of this work. 

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The futile labor of the artist who physically visited all of these locations only to photograph the sky imbues these “blank” images with tension. The images demand our attention, not for the visual details (the clouds, the birds etc) on the surface, but for what they fail to capture, namely the random surges of violence that shook neighborhoods and possibly changed the life courses of those involved. Starting his excavation in news archives with the locations of bomb attacks in the 1967 riots and later moving on to the years 1968-72, Leung captures the dissonance in the society after the bloodiest riots in the history of Hong Kong. Despite being hastily downplayed by the colonial government, the haunting presence of the riots can be felt in the fissure between the official effort to foster a local youth culture (in order to channel energy away from politics), and the unrest and disaffection still bubbling beneath the surface in the lower social strata. 

 

Like The Date Series, the show as a whole speaks about the colonial trauma of Hong Kong, but in a very subtle and muted way. The collage series Excellent first appears to be a commentary on Sino-British relations in the 1980s. Utilizing British tabloids such as Daily Mirror and The Sun that published the first official photo of Prince William on 29 July, 1982, the artist reworks the front page and creates an amalgamation of media containing the word “China” in English or Chinese, such as a record by the synth pop band China Crisis and the Atari video game China Syndrome. Princess Diana smiles at us brightly across all of the collages. It is only with closer viewing that the handwriting of the word “Excellent” on the bottom right corner of each collage becomes noticeable. It is revealed to us in the exhibition booklet that 29 July, 1982 was also the day of an informal lunch meeting, in which the Chinese ambassador and British governor discussed the future of Hong Kong. Margaret Thatcher’s comment on the report about the meeting is precisely, “excellent” — what she meant by that remains unclear. Perhaps it was the equivalent of a simple “like” in the social media era. In any case, with the realization of the origin of this handwritten word in the collage, the ironic and telling absence of Hong Kong becomes too loud to ignore.

 

For Foucault, the archive is “the law of what can be said” and the system that establishes the enunciabilities of statements. In this show, Margaret Thatcher — more specifically, her handwriting and writing hand — occupies the centerstage as the enunciating subject. Her memoir The Downing Street Years is displayed on a music stand in the sculpture Gather the Tears. Although her administration had an important role in deciding the fate of the six million people in Hong Kong, the city is only mentioned on eleven pages in the 900-page memoir. The artist sliced these eleven pages into thin paper strands, thus turning the writing into metaphorical tears that fall from the cheap approximation of a crown placed on top of the book. This collage of objects is therefore an oblique commentary on the metropole-colony relationship. 

 

In stark contrast to Thatcher, the colonized subject is confined to the realm of the unenunciable. Excluded from the arena of politics, they are trapped in a forcibly imposed silence, resulting in archival gaps. The lacuna is therefore also the site of the wound created by repeated colonization and the perpetual strangulation of cultural identity and political agency, both before and after Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997. One of the only gestures available to the colonized subject in face of the colonial archive is deconstruction, and such is the operation that Thatcher’s memoir underwent in the hands of Leung. On the book cover (which one can only see by crouching down), the author’s name and the book title is reconfigured into “GA__TH__ER THE T_EARS.” The face of Thatcher is neatly hollowed out, creating a wound on the book. It is from this wounded place that the colonized subject begins to speak. 

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​(2023)