Looking at Looking

It was July 1, the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to China, when I headed to the Hong Kong Museum of Art to see Lam Tung Pang’s video installation Image-coated (2019). Projected onto a translucent screen over windows with panoramic views of Victoria Harbour, the central video is a bricolage of animated charcoal drawings, manipulated camera footage, and found images forming a multilayered, fantastical chronicle delineating the port-city’s history through its morphing landscape. As a rough contour of an undeveloped Victoria Harbour faded from the screen and the foreboding sound of rumbling thunder filled the space, I walked toward the uncovered windows where Lam had drawn raindrops with a whiteboard marker. Outside, gliding across the waters, was a behemoth barge stacked with 80 shipping containers bearing banners that altogether read: “In celebration of the National Security Law.” The historic addendum, prohibiting vaguely defined acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, or foreign intervention, had come into effect just the night prior, muzzling Hong Kong’s freedom of speech and pro-democracy movement. Lam’s invocation of stormy weather symbolically and prophetically captured the city’s doubly heavy uncertainty that day.

When I spoke to the artist the following week at his studio in the industrial area of Fotan, he described Image-coated as one of three “love letters” that he has written to Hong Kong over the past year, a time of unprecedented changes in the place he calls home. We discussed these projects, as well as the importance—and sometimes impossibility—of clear-eyed perspectives on time and one’s surroundings.

You have said that embodies all the aspects of your practice, so let’s