‘Killed off’ Hong Kong village school in art project evokes treasured, and painful, memories for local artist

Sara Tse recalled some of her happiest years, but also her father’s infidelity, when she returned to Kwai Chung Public School, closed in 2007 because of low attendance

Those memories became part of an art project organised by a local non-profit to recall the spirit of such ‘village schools’

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A former classroom inside the now derelict Kwai Chung Public School in Hong Kong. Artist Sara Tse, a former pupil, explored the history and her memories of the school, which was “killed off” in 2007, as part of an art project run by the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage. Photo: Fannie Wong

Published: 12:45pm, 4 Feb 2022

A work by Sara Tse Suk-ting at Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture seems to capture the current predilection for nostalgia.

Time Traveller (2014) is a tableau consisting of copies of her late mother’s personal possessions arranged across a cluster of vintage furniture and a treadle sewing machine. The soft shapes of the replicas are deceptive: the white gloves folded over the back of a rocking chair, the lace shawl hanging on the wall and the hat on the dressing table are in fact all ceramic pieces.

Tse had dipped some of her mother’s things in liquid clay and fired them in her kiln, preserving the smallest of details while incinerating the originals. The result was both a joss offering and an embalming of the past.

The multimedia artist began to use this method in 2006. Her mother, who died in 2012, had by then been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and grew increasingly frail due to other long-term health issues. “The material captures just how brittle human life really is,” Tse says.

The sewing machine and various ceramic pieces of Tse’s Time Traveller tableau, at M+ in Hong Kong. Photo: Courtesy of M+

Her practice has often involved a look back at history, be it her personal memories or the history embedded in places (the latter gave rise to her “Mapping Memories” series, based on carefully reproduced street maps on ceramic).