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. 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). In 2021, she joined a project organised by the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage (CACHe), a Hong Kong non-profit, that saw the personal and the collective collide. Through it, she also discovered new layers of meaning in her process of metamorphosis by fire Bright lights, big city: photo exhibition recalls a neon-lit Hong Kong “The Village School Anthem Project” was initiated by CACHe to recall the spirit of a specific type of learning establishment that includes the Kwai Chung Public School, where Tse spent her primary school years: intimate, spacious, green and fast-disappearing due to the pressures of development. A lot of these “village schools” have succumbed to low attendance, closed down by the government in a process called “school killing” in Cantonese. The term rather captures the brutality inherent in closing down schools. Schools are always sites of great cultural significance, one can argue, given that so many generations of people spend their formative years in them. Tse’s own school was “killed off” in 2007 and the cluster of single-storey buildings atop a small hill has sat in silence since, falling increasingly into dereliction while awaiting the bulldozers. “Those were some of the happiest years for my family. We lived in one of the villages just behind Castle Peak Road that were built in the 1970s to rehouse inhabitants of indigenous villages displaced by redevelopment. My parents rented a house there and so me and my siblings all attended the village school on foot,” she says. As part of the Village School project, she created works on paper, videos and ceramic pieces representing her most treasured moments, such as an imprint of the classroom floor where she and sister Shirley, a fellow artist who represented Hong Kong in the 2019 Venice Biennale , used to make up their own games. She also delved deep into the school’s history and discovered that the founding headmaster was once the head of a Christian school in Guangzhou, in mainland China’s Guangdong province, called Puiying School. “He missed the school so much that he borrowed the Puiying school anthem, adapted the school motto and even used a similar eagle-shaped emblem for our school,” Tse says. The ghost of another school lived on at her little primary school, too. A memorial at the end of the playground in Chinese characters bears the name Kwan Choi School, a so-called bok bok zai where a Confucian, rote-learning syllabus was taught under a Qing-dynasty education model. The school, formerly at a nearby site, was owned by the family of one of Kwai Chung Public School’s founders, who sold the school to build the one on which the memorial stands. “The memorial also contains rows of ceramic photographs of donors such as businessmen Deacon Chiu Te-ken and Cha Chi-ming,” Tse says. “It will probably be knocked down in the future, so I asked my former classmates to come and help me make stone rubbings of the memorial plaques. It was probably the first time any of us really took notice of all the details.” She also made cyanotypes of the donors’ portraits; using natural sunlight to reproduce images already preserved by firing has a certain poetic logic that reflects her interest in extracting meaning through the transformation of everyday materials. But the retracing of one’s childhood footsteps can lead to uncovering painful memories, too. As Tse spent time on the empty campus, where walls with blackboards are now adorned in vibrant graffiti (the government hired 24-hour security guards to discourage trespassers), she recalled how her father used to come and pick her up at school and the special bond the two had shared, and how it unravelled. When she was eight, her father asked on their way home if she would mind if a young boy of the same age moved in with them and went to the same school. The penny dropped the next day when her older siblings revealed her father’s infidelity to her after a huge row between her parents. “I stopped talking to him then. Eventually, he just took off and moved back to Indonesia, his birthplace, and the family never saw him again. I used to think maybe I was at fault, and I think I have been carrying this inside me ever since,” she says. And so she did what she always did: find resolution through art. It doesn’t always involve burning things. “After I had a row with my older brother over the care of my mother, I decided to make a stuffed model of a tricycle that he used to have to recall the time when we played together as kids. When I was done, I began to see his point of view and stopped feeling so angry,” she says. With the episode involving her father, she decided to take a page from Wong Kar-wai’s movie In the Mood For Love and poured the family secret into a hole in a tree at the back of the school – conceptually at least. As part of the CACHe project, a QR code above the hole leads to a recording of Tse narrating the story. Other videos and images were also accessible via QR codes pinned around the school for small groups of visitors who joined Tse’s recent tours. Most of these files are also available on her YouTube page. This airing of family skeletons is cathartic, she says. It also highlights a fundamental element in her artmaking: a resistance of grand narratives via truth-telling. “I know that people may go and see ‘Time Traveller’ and get fixated on the sewing machine and think it’s all about our collective memory. It doesn’t matter if they do, but I want to be clear that that’s not why I make art. I make it for my own personal reasons and also to point out what I feel are the most important things in life,” she says. This is not what art students are always told they are allowed to do. “When I was at university and learning about conceptual art, we all talked big. I wasn’t always very comfortable about that. My position is not grand at all, but it’s my story and it’s a real story,” she says. Later, she intends to plan an exhibition of all the mementos she has taken of the school, including ceramic copies of fallen leaves she collected from outside her classrooms. “I feel there is a difference in what I have been doing at the school from my previous projects,” she says. “The school will probably disappear soon and so there is still that sense of fragility that I want to capture. But as I was making the stone rubbings and the ceramic leaves, I felt that what I was capturing was how ideas and spirits can be transplanted, just as the ideals of the Guangzhou Puiying school were passed on to us. Even if a place changes, there are intangible values that we can all try and keep alive.”