LEUNG CHI-WO & SARA WONG
Husband and wife Leung Chi-wo and Sara Wong share a sprawling studio on the top floor of a factory building, where they have worked collaboratively and individually for nearly 20 years. “Our building is almost like a coworking space,” says Wong. “There are artists and set designers and a production house for TV shows— there’s even a very famous singer-songwriter who has a recording studio here.”
This idea of a community of creative people all influencing each other—whether knowingly or subliminally—ties in neatly with Wong’s latest series, which records the physical marks all of us unwittingly leave behind. “I ask people to let me into their house or office and I find traces of people’s activities—a scratch on the floor or on the wall, a tear in the wallpaper. Then I fill these gaps in with plaster mixed with a light-sensitive material,” says Wong. When night falls or lights are turned off, this material glows in the dark, revealing the smudge of a hand along the wall, the trail of chair legs repeatedly pushed along the floor or countless other signs of human activity. Wong then immortalises the scene in a photograph.
Leung is also working on a solo photography project. “I have been doing a lot of archival research about sites of violence,” he says. “Fifty years to the day after the event, I go back to the site. Normally the area has changed a lot, so I only photograph the sky—all you can see in the photo are the clouds.” Leung rarely finds any sign the event ever happened. Often businesses have closed, families
have moved on and buildings have been pulled down. That slice of sky is all that remains the same.
An interest in history also sparked one of the couple’s ongoing collaborative series, for which they find intriguing anonymous figures in the background of photos in newspapers, magazines and old photo albums, then recreate these people’s poses and outfits for large-scale portraits. Leung models if the figure is a man; Wong if it’s a woman. “We always look for people who are impossible to identify,” says Leung. “And we create an identity and backstory for this person.” In Leung and Wong’s photos, these previously peripheral figures are put centrestage and, in the moment Leung and Wong pose, the past becomes the present.