回歸塔 Tower of Return
(pages from a sketchbook, photos from a trip home)
Ink on paper, analogue film photo prints, 2019-23
Exhibited at Kin, Pari
The Tower of Return is a local landmark in Tai Po, New Territories, commemorating the return of Hong Kong in 1997. I promised my aunt I would go visit the landmark with her. However, I didn’t keep my promise. And she has since passed away.
Using brush and line work, I sketched a semblance of the Tower from indistinct memories of what it looked like. The suite of drawings is accompanied by a series of analogue photos taken in Hong Kong, last time I returned in 2019. They were everyday scenes taken from the neighbourhood surrounding my aunt’s home.
Both the photographs and sketches evade a direct depiction of the subject matter, emblematic of how my family speaks in euphemisms when it comes to loss.
The shape of grief ruptures, spirals and ascends…to a place I cannot return to.
Close up of 回歸塔 Tower of Return (pages from a sketchbook), 2023
回歸塔 Tower of Return (photos from a trip home), 2019
Exhibition view, photos by Document Photography
Left - Kim Pham , Phở, 2023
Right - Mei Lin Meyers, Pillow Talk, 2022
More at Kin, Pari:
Apparitions
Liquid chalk on glass, dimensions variable, 2023
I think about encounters— ties, linkages, connections — people meeting, converging and diverging… I think about traces of emotions that linger in space, like ghosts — apparitions.
Found family, friendship, love and loss all of it passes through the confines of place.
