Victoria Harbour is a defining feature of my childhood home, Hong Kong: a place of movement, trade, and identity. While I was growing up, Hong Kong was still a British colony governed by the rule of law, yet its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 shaped the political atmosphere of everyday life long before it took place. For many of my generation, that deadline was not an abstract historical event but a condition we were born into. As a Chinese family, my parents prepared for that transition by ensuring I was born in the United States, in anticipation of Hong Kong’s return to China.
That sense of contingency sits behind this painting. The familiar skyline is interrupted by a looming black square, a force that is at once present and consuming. Its structured void unsettles the delicate balance of the city, bringing into focus tensions between permanence and erasure, belonging and displacement. The softened, dissolving edges of the skyline suggest a place in flux, mirroring both political instability and the fragile condition of memory itself.
Here, the black square stands not only for the weight of history, but also for the collective presence of those who filled the streets dressed in black, resisting forces that sought to redefine their home. This painting sits at the emotional centre of the series. It is not only about protest, but about living in the shadow of an anticipated change, and about the spaces we struggle to preserve even as their ground shifts beneath us.
