Review: Journal of the Plague Year

Racism and colonial superiority form the core themes of this exhibition about Hong Kong's bouts of sickness and epidemic over the past century.

Para Site's executive director Cosmin Costinas and independent curator Inti Guerrero have curated "Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, Ghosts, Rebels, Sars, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story".

Beginning chronologically, this overly-ambitious exhibition outlines Hong Kong's outbreaks of sickness and its responses. Larry Feign's cartoons of the first interactions between the British and Chinese after Britain's annexation of Hong Kong Island in 1841 are amusingly mirrored in his own contemporary cross-cultural comic Lily Wong.

The 1894 plague outbreak is depicted in a series of photographs of the densely populated Tai Ping Shan area of Sheung Wan being cleaned by sanitary workers. The solution to this unhealthy environment is Hong Kong's first forced land resumption.