An artist and a former journalist have teamed up to illustrate the city's transition from relative openness to tighter controls on free speech.
Artist Chow Chun Fai studied old news archives to try to understand what could be said about the transformed Hong Kong.
His exhibition, Interview with the Interviewer II, is the second part of a long-term collaboration with Sharon Cheung, a former television journalist who covered diplomatic news from 1995 to 2004 before founding her eponymous art space, SC Gallery. It will be on view in March in the Insight section of Art Basel Hong Kong.
The exhibition revisits scenes from her reporting, from the White House lawn to a Harvard auditorium where Chinese leaders gave speeches. It also includes the official moment when Hong Kong was handed over to China by the British. The paintings rethink Hong Kong’s turbulent political transformation in recent years, and how it has become increasingly caught up in the tensions between the US and China.
“Looking at history doesn’t necessarily give a clear answer, but it does give people the opportunity to rethink memory,” said Chris Van Feng, the exhibition’s curator. “Art can help us understand from a more personal perspective rather than an institutional one.”
Cheung’s journalism career began before Hong Kong, a former British colony, was handed back to China in 1997. Over the next decade, she traveled the world covering diplomatic news. Locally, she gained notoriety as the Hong Kong reporter whose persistent questions so irritated former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin that he chided her for being “too simple-minded, sometimes naive,” in a lengthy tirade recorded on air.
