Introduction of the artist:

LEUNG Chi Wo (China, Hong Kong)

Born in 1968, Hong Kong. Lives and works in Hong Kong.
Selected solo exhibitions: 2009 (Inter)Viewing Possession, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; 2009 Depot of Disappearance, AiR base, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; 2009 Asia’s World City, Goethe Institut, Hong Kong; 2006 Domestica Invisibile, Goethe Institut, Hong Kong; 2000 Something About City Sky, Queens Museum of Art, New York;
Selected group exhibitions: 2012 Marrakech Biennale 4; 2011 Pingyao International Photo Festival, China; 2010 No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern, London; 2008 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China; 2008 Lights Out, Museu da Imagem e do Som, S?o Paulo, Brazil; 2007 Reversing Horizons, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai.

Introduction of works:

《Bright light, such as snow and ice》ChinaMail, 1893, Photograph, 2012

《Bright light, such as snow and ice》photo+text, 25.5x20cm, 1870-75, Photograph, 2012

In mid-January 1893, Hong Kong recorded its lowest temperature ever: -4℃ on Peak Victoria. The China Mail reported, “For the last two days we have been experiencing a spell of cold weather which is agreed to be unprecedented in the history of the Colony … All over the Peak District the verandas of the houses, the tennis courts, and a portion of the roads are covered with ice. Heavy icicles are hanging from the eaves of the houses, and … the frost has fixed upon tree, shrub and grass, and as it glisters in the light gives all the appearance of a snow-covered landscape.”

 No living person today has witnessed tropical Hong Kong in the snow. Indeed, as reported by the paper, “Pun Lun, the well-known photographer, took a number of views of the Peak district during the two days that ‘Jack Frost’ was reigning supreme there”; however, the photographic images have never been seen publicly. Nonetheless, through Leung Chi Wo’s most recent installation work we can now ‘touch’ snowy Hong Kong.

On the wall is a single button made with an antique 20-cent Hong Kong coin, minted in 1893, which is connected to a refrigerating system maintaining a temperature of 0°C. Audience members are invited to press and hold the button, for both a burst of cold weather and a moment of direct physical contact with the year of the frost. Meanwhile, on the opposite wall, a translucent text describing the severe cold of 1893 Hong Kong engraved on a piece of Plexiglass fades away as a dim late- nineteenth-century photo by Pun Lun illuminates. One of the five men sitting around the table in the image looks at us in the same way he once looked at Pun Lun’s camera lens, potentially the very same lens that captured that unique wintry Hong Kong day.

We still have yet to find visual evidence of the incident, but can feel it through the time that separates us from it. The vision of snowy Hong Kong is not one created by!