A Sydney-based Hong Kong artist who completed her art degrees after retirement holds an exhibition expressing her experiences as an immigrant and as an ode to her hometown.
Pamela Leung immigrated to Australia in the 1970s. After retiring at 60, she spent seven and a half years obtaining three college degrees, including a master of Fine Art from the National Art School in 2016. She then won the Emerging Artist Prize in the 65th Blake Prize 2018.
Her exhibition, “Longing for home, ”is an extension of her eponymous exhibition held in 2022. It makes subtle commentary on the changing political status and social landscape of Hong Kong and how the changes have made it impossible for some Hongkongers to return home. Leung told The Epoch Times, “these recent years were a lengthy, trying time for the Hongkongers,” and she wanted to express the feeling of Hongkongers leaving home by means of her art. She brought ten pieces of work to the exhibition at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
Traditional Chinese Characters
“In the last two years, I asked my Hong Kong friends living abroad for a favor, I asked them to help collect newspapers written in traditional Chinese. I used that to finish this artwork.” Leung showed her work, “Agglomerate,” made from paper string to The Epoch Times. She wove the paper string into a round pad that can be extended infinitely, symbolizing the Chinese tradition of passing Chinese culture from generation to generation.Leung believes that traditional Chinese characters mean a lot to the Chinese people. The “CCP (Chinese Communist Party) invaded mainland China and simplified Chinese characters 70 years ago, which devastated the connotation of traditional Chinese characters completely. Traditional Chinese has a history of 5,000 years, and now only people in Hong Kong and Taiwan use it.
I still insist on using traditional Chinese, and please, all my friends must find me those newspapers still using traditional Chinese characters.” During the interview, she showed the latest Epoch Times in Chinese edition brought by her friend in the U.K. She laughed and said The Epoch Times Chinese edition was the most collected newspaper by her friends as The Epoch Times has spread worldwide and only The Epoch Times insists on using traditional Chinese characters.
Encouraging the Next Generation
With $300AUD in her pocket and a suitcase, Leung, at the age of 20, got a 3-month visa and traveled solo to Australia with courage. “That was in the 1970s. I really burned bridges and never planned to come back to Hong Kong at that time.”Recalling that time, Leung said she could not remember how she got the courage to do it. Her family’s financial situation was not that good, she only knew some simple English expressions at that time and had no relatives overseas. She just hoped to have some breakthrough and not be restricted by her parents.
After heading to Australia, Leung, who only received a high school education, was introduced to work as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant by her friend. She then worked as a typesetter in a publishing house. At first, Australia did not have strict control over identity. Chinese people working as illegal laborers were very common. She worked two jobs for seven years without any rest days.
Leung recalled the days that she started her business. It was a tough time, but through her perseverance, she got over it. “Later, my boyfriend in Hong Kong also came to Australia, and we built our family together. We bought our house and fought for our business from scratch. We didn’t know about socializing and had no friends. We just kept working and ‘worked’ for our living.”
After giving birth to two children in the 1980s, Leung stopped working for her boss and started her own business. “I first founded a shop for kids selling kid’s clothing for ten years. After that, I wanted to fulfill my dream of opening a coffee shop. When I was small, I thought having a coffee shop was very romantic with the music, antique furniture, and customers enjoying books and chats. However, it was not that romantic in reality, and it was tough. Ten more years passed, and my children grew up. I also retired.”
Leung made the decision to pursue a university degree at 60 years old. She recalled, “I always wanted to go to university. I did not have the chance to do this. Now I had time, and I could pay my tuition fee, so I wanted to give it a shot.”
She studied at the National Art School at Darlinghurst, the best art school in Australia. She obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture) in the NAS in 2012 and studied different art courses, including painting and drawing. She then got her bachelor of Fine Arts Honors in Drawing and then a Master of Fine Arts in Painting.
It was not easy for her. She said, “I didn’t have a good foundation for using the English language. It was tough. I cried and told my mum after my second examination. I was 60 at that time. I thought I did badly in my exam and could not remember things well at my age.”
Leung, as an artist, participated in exhibitions all over the world and visited different cities in Australia, in addition, to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden, Paris, and London. She found her “second life.” In 2018, she won the 65th Blake Prize Emerging Artist Prize, an art prize with a long history.
Nostalgia
Leung has profound experience in immigration. After studying Art, she used different ways to express her ideas about life and society. Since 2016, she has held exhibitions worldwide and “found art is a very flexible way to let her express her ideas freely.”She believed that the installation art bears a deep mark of a generation. From April to May 2022, Leung held the “Longing for home” exhibition in Australia for the first time. Through video, drawing, sculpture, and cross-platform installation art, she expressed her helplessness, fear, and anxiety against the immigration wave in the last two years due to the social movement and the Hongkongers who left their home to pursue freedom.
She introduced, “most artwork in this exhibition is related to ‘home,’ such as the neon lighting showing ‘ngor you fan uk kei’ (I want to go home) in Cantonese, and a video recording of a well-known song, “The Moon Represents My Heart,” sung by 13 Hongkongers who immigrated to different countries. The song is a song that everyone is familiar with at our age, which can directly express our feelings about missing our home, she said.
In addition, some of her work reflected the status quo of Hong Kong, such as the installation art representing “eggs and high walls,” meaning people are fragile, but the authorities are strong. The artwork is a typewriter working hard, but it can’t type out any words. She also used crushed newspaper to reproduce a white paper to express Hongkongers’ inability to speak of the situation in Hong Kong but hoped outsiders would still understand.
The exhibition “Longing for home” in Australia was a notable success. While visiting her relatives in the UK in the winter of 2022, Leung contacted artist Clara Cheung who immigrated to the UK. They hit it off when they first met and together curated the exhibition “Longing for home II” in a short time. They found Bloc Projects, an art space, to display their artwork. This allowed Leung to bring her exhibition from Australia to the U.K.
Recalling her 40-year immigrant life, Leung encouraged the new generation of Hongkongers, “As long as you can suffer hardship, you can overcome everything confronting you. It is not easy to start over in a new place. I understand the feeling of leaving our hometown and how hard it is to be far away from home.
Even without money, education level, or technology, I always tell the younger generation to “Believe in themselves.” Once you can suffer the hardship and step out, you will always get an opportunity!” She also hopes that the exhibition “Longing For Home” can help immigrant Hongkongers to reflect on 2023. To never forget their home and wait patiently for the days we can go home.
“Longing for home” will run from Jan. 4 to 13, 2023, at Bloc Projects, in Sheffield, United Kingdom.
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