Breath Marks: Queen Elizabeth II and Crying Hong Kong Girl
2023
Isaac Chong Wai
Archival Print, Etching on glasses, 14 panels, wooden base
Print: 160 x 120cm
Glass: 40 x 30 x 1 cm each
Wooden base: 43 x 30 x 3 cm
In Chong’s Breath Marks: Queen Elizabeth II and Crying Hong Kong Girl (2023), comprising a photographic print and a glass sculpture, the artist uses his breath marks to “paint” an image circulated amongst Hong Kong social media, of a young girl sorrowfully grasping photographs of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The girl bawls on the ground next to a public memorial outside the British Consulate in Hong Kong, placed in commemoration of the British monarch who had passed away. The crying girl received criticism amongst netizens for how she had no direct relations with the Queen and too young to have experienced colonial Hong Kong, hence the ambiguity as to why she was so devastated. Using his breath mark as a paint brush, Chong delineates the contours of the crying girl. Breath by breath, stroke by stroke, the process is repeated until the outline of the mourning girl is “painted”.
The resultant image is turned into a photographic print. Each breath mark is also etched onto fourteen individual glass panels lined at varying widths from one another to form a glass sculpture. When the sculpture is viewed from the front, the “breath marks” stack together to reveal the abstracted silhouette of the crying girl. Through this work, Chong reflects on the ambivalence of postcolonial Hong Kong, the Queen being once the symbol of nostalgia for the colonial era, and the figurehead of a statecraft that afflicted discrimination upon its colonial subjects. The artist asks: what is the significance of mourning the deceased? How does it shape our understanding of the past, our identity in the present, and our imagination of the future?”