Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon

2019 - Installation (Installation)

18:35 minutes

Cici Wu

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Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon by Cici Wu is delicate, but physically much more robust than Cici Wu’s earlier works. What continues is the sense of longing, of something unresolved; it is haunting, like the images from a dream that we try to remember upon waking up. Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon revolves around the story of a developmentally challenged young boy, who purportedly disappeared during the handover of Hong Kong by the British to Chinese governance. Presented as a visual narrative, the abstract fictive story is told through unfolding visuals in a projection, which is accompanied by a curious object placed on the floor near the screen. This prop — an amalgam from the detritus of commercial movie industry sets — amplifies the questions Wu raises about reality and dreams. How close is the imaginary as told in cinema, to actual historical events? How do we know or understand what are facts and what is truth? In this day and age of fabricated news, who takes the time to get to the bottom of a story fed through superficially and inaccurately reported blogs?

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Beijing-born artist Cici Wu is a cultural nomad whose work takes on unusual forms, from functional sculptures to haphazard installations featuring delicate jerry-rigged parts, including for example: a stepper motor, belt, pulley, light sensor, sleeves, silicone, silver chain, dried strawberry leaves, and a video. Another installation might be made up of ceramic, clay, handmade glass, silicone, plaster, white fabric, rice paper, ink, a plastic drop cloth, and a sponge mop. Interested in both the materiality of the tools used for observing and interpreting the world, as well as the affective interactions that shape these observations, Wu’s oneiric installations probe questions of memory, identity, ritual and emotion.

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Colors:

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• materiality.n.02
• narrative.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• dream.n.01
• world.n.03
• urban.a.01
• memory.n.01