Up Close: Leung Chi Wo
By Grace Jefferd
Full text also available in Chinese.
Installation view of LEUNG CHI WO’s (left) My Random Diary 0, 2023, single-channel video installation: 18 min 5 sec; and (right) My Random Diary, 2020, single-channel video installation: 18 min 5 sec, at "Past-Future Tense," Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
Fiftieth anniversaries are momentous: sometimes eagerly anticipated, other times dreaded. But what of the mundane and forgotten dates? In Leung Chi Wo’s most recent video installation My Random Diary 0 (2023) the artist continues his exploration of Hong Kong’s colonial history. The 18-minute film comprises black-and-white photographs capturing sites in Hong Kong where an official event took place—a government-sponsored children’s fair, for example—juxtaposed with an unrelated crime or a violent dispute between neighbors that took place on the same day in a different area of the city. Rather than using archival photographs, Leung returned to the locations in which the original events occurred exactly 50 years earlier. Images are captioned with the date, time, and details of the events, spanning February 22, 1970, to December 31, 1972, and plays in chronological order, accompanied by a simple, music-box style soundtrack.
Like a strange timeline, one photograph fades into the next as each story unfolds while time expands and contracts—a several-week gap follows a series of consecutive dates. Though seemingly a bare sequence of dates and facts, the repetition creates an unfocused perspective to which the viewer applies their own political and social lens. Each official event might show how removed colonial officials were from the violence experienced by residents. Or maybe they highlight the lack of autonomy—Hong Kongers couldn’t determine their own policies, they could only hold a parade or inaugurate a new building. Some captions detail episodes of societal unrest and police brutality, but the stories are placed over currently peaceful photographs of what was the scene of the crime. Does this imply colonial police brutality is over, that the unrest was temporary, or that the sense of restiveness and rebellion still bubbles just under the surface? Ultimately, Leung suggests, we decide what to make of the past.
