Riot, 2008

digital print and oil on linen

2 panels, 85 x 125 cm each, 170 x 125 cm overall

M+ Museum Collection, Hong Kong

1967DISPERSION
10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 27 November 2008 – 17 January 2009

"Working in my Melbourne studio in the winter of 2007, it suddenly occurred to me that indeed it was the 40th anniversary of my initial departure from Hong Kong. In that winter, I read Walter Benjamin’s recollections of his childhood years in Berlin. He was at once fascinated, melancholic and plagued by the phantoms of that time. Those from a diaspora – the Jews, the Irish, the Polish, the Chinese – can tell you precisely and in meticulous detail why and how they left the land that bore them. More often than not, the reasons for leaving were abject. The year of 1967 in Hong Kong was no exception.

1967 was a year of drought, floods and riots. The droughts and floods were god’s will. The riots were man's. Hong Kong became the fault line of ideologies – between the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ and the defense of one of the last promising capitalist experiments of the British Colonial Empire. I left Hong Kong, as a child, with a C-class British passport. Then I began to see the documentary photos from newsprints - the horror on the faces of the poor British bomb disposal experts, immediately after their limbs were blown off – by ‘pineapples’ – those makeshift bombs in shopper bags that you stay well clear of at tram stops.

Its well known how the Riots started at a plastics flower factory. Plastics was the roaring industry at the time – the dolls, the flowers, the Red-A buckets I bathed with – signs of modernity, signs of capitalist oppression, signs of modular utility, signs of fat cats to come.

The abstracts that accompany the images are meticulously painted in oils, but originally generated out of thousands of images technologically. These 60’s high modernist looking abstracts make you feel that, just perhaps, the riot scenes had been related to them all along."

-JY October 2008