Chromogenic prints, 100 x 150 cm each, since 2010
He was lost yesterday and we found him today is a collaboration by Leung Chi Wo + Sara Wong. Reviewing photo images from the mass media, Leung & Wong contemplate the presence of all those unidentified minor figures or those who were accidentally captured for a grander narrative. But Roland Barthes’ noeme of photography suggests that anyone who was photographed, no matter how minor s/he was, must have been there. Although we don’t know them at all, they have already occupied a place in our past. By posing as those who appeared in the found images, Leung & Wong challenge the authority of the grand narrative portrayed by the media on one hand; and also shed light on the poetics of photography through their own presence in the newly studio-shot photograph. The impossibility to identify an unidentified person in the past has become the artists’ romantic encounter with the history in a most humble but vivid way.
The display of the work is a juxtaposition of a found object and a life-sized print of the artists themselves. The types of the object are not limited, such as postcards, books and magazines, new or old, as far as they contain the images that inspire the photographic re-enactment.
Installation view. ©Goethe Institut Hongkong
