LIGHT MATTERS
An iconography of women confronting the dark

Hong Kong / London
2019–2022
9-channel video installation with photography
WMA Masters Award recipient
Catalogue published by Mörel Books, London.

The work does not attempt to document the protests. It asks what remains when public language becomes unsafe — when speech withdraws and meaning shifts into body, rhythm, and spatial relation. Film therefore becomes not recording but situation: perception forms between those present.

Light in this work is not only illumination. It is projection. It is information. It is exposure. In a city of permanent brightness — neon, screens, surveillance — visibility becomes a condition. When light exceeds perception, it produces blindness.

For a time the city held the attention of the world. Tens of thousands gathered weekend after weekend, a sea of people with empty hands, later with helmets, songs, and hopes. From 2018 onward intimidation, arrests, and disappearance entered everyday life. Most fell silent. Thousands fled — usually those who could afford to. Tens of thousands were detained; many remain imprisoned.

When the global gaze moved on — to Myanmar, Belarus, Ukraine, Gaza — the conditions did not disappear. Hong Kong remained outwardly unchanged: luminous, efficient, ordered. Yet daily life unfolded under a different pressure, one that could not easily be spoken.

Over three years I accompanied young women in their daily lives after the protests, searching for gestures of normality where none remained. During the pandemic almost no one could enter the city; through the WMA Masters Award I was granted access. The work developed through trust and therefore through restraint — visibility without exposure.

images are projected directly onto bodies and walls. The body becomes surface and resistance at once: a screen that receives light, and a presence that transforms it. Projection here is not a digital effect but a physical encounter between image and skin. The question is not only what becomes visible, but who controls visibility.

Many were nineteen or twenty when they left without telling their parents where they were going. Some later formed fragile continuities in London. The diaspora did not mark an end but a continuation of the same condition. When war reached Europe, encounters with women from Ukraine revealed a recognition carried less by words than by posture, movement, and silence.

The installation is structured as a constellation of nine projections. Its spatial logic echoes the temporary barricades of the protests — structures that both block and allow passage. Individuals do not appear as isolated subjects but as presences connected through rhythm and duration.

Images approach and withdraw. Each projection functions as a portrait yet remains part of a shared perceptual field. The work offers no statement. It produces a condition in which light carries what language cannot safely articulate.

The project began in dialogue with philosopher Eva Mann around her book The Iron Ladies. As speaking became impossible, knowledge migrated into the calligraphy of the body. Movement replaced proposition; dance — hip-hop as a street language — operated not as expression but as embodied thinking.