TRANSITION

Winner

YIM Sui-fong - The Unlocked Space

YIM Sui-fong The Civil Servants' Cooperative Building Societies was a housing welfare scheme for civil servants from the 1950s to 1977. The government granted land and loans to the society at a special price. Every tenant knew each other and shared roles in the...
YIM Sui-fong Headlines of the South China Morning Post on 31 May 1989: Executive should be directly elected says Omelco/Boat people towed out to Soko Island/Fear spreads on whereabouts of donated funds/Students press for news of missing 3/The Goddess of Democracy...
YIM Sui-fong In a bedroom, camphor and stinking pills in a wooden wardrobe exude vintage taste. In the corner of the room, a calendar with a celebrity wearing a high cut leg one-piece swimsuit was enough to arouse the imagination. In 1986, Hong Kong people led...
YIM Sui-fong This collection of newspapers shows the owner's worries towards the future of the handover of Hong Kong. Back then, civil servants transitioned smoothly from the British colonial government to the Chinese government. An HKSAR flag and that of the PRC...
YIM Sui-fong The handwritten calendar in a bedroom stays between February and March 2008, mainly recording the homing and departure dates of family members. I believe the white board was used to arrange family gatherings between partners. The same year, the first...
YIM Sui-fong Among the objects left behind are religious artefacts and those pertaining to addiction: the Saints, Jesus Christ, Tudi Gong, Shouxing Gong, the God of Wealth. Virgin Mary sits in the dining room, feng shui books are discovered in the kitchen, and...
YIM Sui-fong The apartment could not be sublet or sold. One can imagine three generations of family members sharing this 2,000 sq ft space. The objects left behind include figurines, dolls, matches, building blocks, a slide that imprinted with the image of a painting...
YIM Sui-fong These old-fashioned dentures are designed according to one’s oral characteristics. It is a prosthetic that has been engraved with the picture of an old man.
YIM Sui-fong Video Home System (VHS) player was officially discontinued in 2016. This represents an epic seeing experience combining waiting, real time recording and rewinding.
YIM Sui-fong A plaque engraved with a Chinese saying that says “Ancestors sow the seeds of success for future generations” and a photo of a late ancestor. Although this house has been abandoned for a year, cacti in the balcony are still alive and propagating.

Biography

Having graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Fine Arts degree, Sui-fong YIM works with images, writing and performative actions that engage people in a constructed situation. Drifting between fiction and history, embodied and emotional memories etc., YIM’s work often explores discrepancies, interpretation and tension that occur in the process of interpersonal communication by retelling one’s memory in connection to everyday life. Recent exhibitions in which YIM’s work has been showcased include Time Attendant (Oil Street Art Space, 2018); the Hong Kong Human Rights Arts Prize 2017 (Blindspot Gallery, 2017); the Talkover/Handover 2.0 (1 a Space, 2017); and Mountain Sites: Views of Laoshan (Sifang Art Museum, 2016); YIM is a co-founder of Rooftop Institute; a core member of the artist collective, L sub, which will be participating in the Echigo-Tsunami Art Triennial 2020 at the Hong Kong House.

Project Statement

Wong Ka Chong (which means “the factory of the British colonial government” in Cantonese) was a cottage house district in which my father lived for many years. I followed the old address and found that it is now a six-storey Civil Servants’ Cooperative Building which has been left abandoned after all the properties were sold to a Chinese Investment Company in 2016. A high-rise luxury apartment will be developed here in the future.

As the door unlocked, my curiosity quickly turned into agitation as the space exposes the grim reality of the times: housing issues in Hong Kong. From illegal cottage houses built by bare hands in the 50s, to the establishment of the system of Cooperative Buildings, there was once hope that civilians could build their homes in Hong Kong. However, housing now brings only stabbing pain to the majority—with ever-surging property prices, one cannot imagine to afford a space called “home”. What now lies in front of me is a large empty apartment, so I can investigate time in Hong Kong as captured by these objects, and to imagine the texture of life of homeowners and the life of a well-off Hong Kong family during the colonial days.

Newspaper clippings of 4th June 1989 and a yellow umbrella wall strap; documents of the Cooperative Building Society and pieces of personal information; five-digit, six-digit, seven-digit, and eight-digit telephone numbers; postcards from overseas and wedding slides; and goddess statues in the living room and copies of pornography in the bedroom fill the space with fantasy — as though one were entering the backstage of history. Collected objects were unearthed and placed, naked, under the sun. These are not artefacts of ancient history but modernity, an arbitrary time capsule that uncovers the interwoven experiences of an individual, a family and life as it is now.  

What encouraged me to revisit the space for a photoshoot was the desire to remap the relationships between the objects and the people who once lived in there, but what I found were objects that had obviously been removed. The presence of randomly inverted boxes and loose items show that the objects had lost their owner, like a piece of history to which no one pays attention, a piece of history that can be freely manipulated, altered, deleted and defined. Does this not represent one nature of transition?  Photography provides a rational lens to observe this unlocked space. It helps capture fleeting emotions in the present. I gave up restoring the truth of the found objects, using instead images to construct a subjective timeline to analyse the seemingly important and unimportant traces marked on the objects, and leave a footnote for the Cooperative Building and its history.