Coronavirus compared to Sars, ‘Yellow Peril’ and death of Leslie Cheung in exhibition on Hong Kong’s past traumas
- Revived exhibition from 2013 evokes images of difficult periods in Hong Kong’s past, such as plague of 1894, Sars outbreak and singer Leslie Cheung’s death
- The exhibition, ‘A Journal of the Plague Year: Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story’, will be a virtual one, streamed on YouTube
Viruses, plagues, racism, the emergence of local identity and the battle to retain it – Hong Kong has been here before, in 1894, long before anyone heard of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), let alone Covid-19 coronavirus.
“Hong Kong, from the beginning of its colonial history, has always been associated with disease,” says Cosmin Costinas, executive director and curator of Para Site, a non-profit contemporary art space in the city, during a talk live streamed on April 1.
So it is apt that he, and fellow curator Inti Guerrero, should be mounting a virtual restaging of a Para Site exhibition from 2013, “A Journal of the Plague Year: Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story”, by streaming videos of the artworks on YouTube.
The show addressed the outbreak of Sars in 2003, the revival of “Yellow Peril” sentiment in the West (and its historical roots), the suicide of superstar Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, and the annual pro-democracy demonstrations held in the city on the anniversary of its return to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997, after 156 years of British rule.
Presented together, the works forged a narrative between these seemingly disparate events, and today the group show resonates with what has been happening since the beginning of the year.
