BLOSSOM EVERWHERE • 2019
Blossom Everywhere is made in response to the volatility and turmoil of social injustices occurring in Hong Kong.
The outlawed black facemask, the essential uniform of the Hong Kong protestor has become Pamela’s motif. Transformed into a flower and repeated, like the Hong Kong student civil disobedience, across the available space with fragile insistence.
Symbolism, politics and sentiment collide as art in Blossom everywhere, posing the futile question of the artist’s intent. However, it is not that the artist is saying anything particular about the political situation in Hong Kong, it is that she is living with a meditation on a confrontation that is reconfiguring her idea of home.
I WANT TO GO HOME • 2019
I Want To Go Home (2020) invites empathy for immigrants and refugees who cannot return home. The artwork consists of video and sound; engaging the truth of most migrants’ experience. A typewriter spells out ‘I Want To Go Home' in white font against a black background, ringing as it reaches the end of the sentence, then looping back to where it started. Never finishing, forever dinging.
The artwork unfolded when Leung was undertaking a residency in Paris for her migration project Moment of Red. When she asked a fellow migrant, “would you go home to your own country in the future?” he replied he had no home to go back to.
Now based in Australia, Leung watched as her hometown - Hong Kong - targeted students in horrific acts of violence in the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in late 2019. The artist burst into tears listening to a local man who tried to help the students escape, repeating, “they just want to go home.”
‘Going home’ is a simple and humble human need, but under the circumstances, it could be impossible; over a war, social or natural disaster. Going home is a privilege.