Thursday 24 October 2019

Pamela Leung

20 October - 23 November      Blossom Everywhere
Link to artist's website























Pamela Leung is a Hong Kong born Australian, who came here about 40 years ago. Like most people who live some distance in kilometers and years from their birthplace there is a sentiment reserved for the homeland that isn’t reasoned and never forsaken. This is the filter through which Pamela has watched the demands of students in Hong Kong for democracy with in the Chinese Republic.  Demands that stretch into the future, beyond the 2047 horizon of the one country two system regime that replaced Hong Kong’s British colonial rule.

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. And while we might wonder what the outcome of the protest movement will eventually be Pamela has taken the dismal view that it will be squashed under the weight of China’s central government.

Symbolism, politics and sentiment collide as art in Pamela’s piece, 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.


- Tony Twigg