Personal and political trauma saw Hong Kong artist create a mystical ‘cave’ now open for visitors

The name of artist Vaevae Chan’s cavelike space, Juen Juen Gung, inside a factory building in Hong Kong, is taken from the Cantonese slang for having a nose around. And that’s what visitors are encouraged to do inside Chan’s immersive creation, She Told Me to Head to The Sea. Without giving away too much about the experience, there are sculptures, installations and videos placed strategically within a dimly lit cocoon surrounded by artificial rocks. The final video, also called She Told Me to Head to the Sea, pulls the different strands together. This is the story: a young tigress has been badly hurt and wants to hide from the world. With her bare claws she digs a cave inside a mountain and there she stays, licking her wounds, having visions of Chinese demons and surviving on jet-black mantou (steamed buns) that only plunge her deeper into darkness. One day, a wise woman urges her to head to the sea. The apparition of a father tiger figure and an assortment of Chinese deities also help lift her out of despondency. The ending, filled with light, is suggestive of rebirth and transformation. The Post met Chan recently in Repulse Bay, in the southern part of Hong Kong Island, at the temple to the sea goddess Tin Hau. Standing among giant statues of benign immortals on a sunny day, with the sound of gently lapping waves in the background, the darkness of Chan’s cave seemed a long way away. What was life like in Hong Kong’s first jail? New digital show reveals all But it was only recently that Chan had emerged from a different “cave” – where she lived for much of 2019 and 2020 when she was struggling with grief and depression. That she came out the other side, and with fresh resolve, was what prompted her to open up the site of her rehabilitation to others who might need it. Born in Hong Kong in 1990, the artist spent seven years living in New York, where she graduated from the Parsons School of Design with a degree focused on ceramic art. She was going to settle in the Big Apple after making a promising start in her career as an artist, until a series of unexpected events occurred. First, she developed severe eczema in 2017. She returned to Hong Kong for a change of climate and diet, which included an extreme Chinese medicine made with scorpions (it worked, she said.) She had a temporary job as part of the team that gave the Eaton Hotel in Kowloon a trendy makeover, and was planning to return to New York afterwards. Then her father died suddenly. “It was 2018. And it was really traumatic for me. I couldn’t process it at all that year while I was working on the Eaton project. I couldn’t feel anything until 2019, which was also when I got out of a toxic relationship. The grief kicked in really badly,” she said. Not only that, but during 2019, Chan and many of her friends joined the protests against proposed legislation that would have allowed the extradition of Hong Kong people for trial in mainland China. The protests turned violent and sparked a crackdown. “I went in the early stage of the protests. The whole thing was not only my personal trauma, but a huge traumatic event for Hong Kong. I felt really helpless. It felt like the world had gone mad,” she said. So she retreated into her studio inside a factory building in San Po Kong. It was initially just an escape from the world, but her creative urge took over and redecorating it became a distraction and means of empowerment. “Every single inch of space is controlled by me. Every single object is there because I’ve put it there,” she says. The finished “cave”, now open to a maximum of three people each booking, is filled with mysterious objects placed in dimly lit nooks and crannies that visitors can explore with pen torches provided. Apart from a video with a clear narrative, visitors are free to make their own associations between the seemingly random selection of objects. At the end of the video you will see me rolling out from the cave to the sea. It’s kind of a metaphor for my path to healing. Vaevae Chan It is spooky, mystical and quietly compelling – this writer easily spent 45 minutes inside, just exploring. Chan admits to the influence of Louis Cha’s martial arts historical novels, in which heroes and heroines would nurse their nearly fatal injuries in caves, practise meditation and qigong, and nearly always emerge stronger. Another artistic inspiration is the Haw Par Villa in Singapore, built by the Aw brothers, who created the Tiger Balm lotion, and much better preserved than the mansion and garden they built in Hong Kong. “I went to Singapore on my own in 2018 before everything happened and I felt this comforting energy there, very much like the ambience here in the Repulse Bay temple,” she said. That magical, contained universe probably informed her own cave subconsciously, she said. But it was only afterwards, when she read up on the Aw brothers, that she found more serendipitous coincidences: Aw Boon Haw (the brother whose first name means tiger) died on Chan’s birthday, and the year he died was also the year when Chan’s father was born. “I just feel there’s this connection. That’s why I made the video about tigers,” she says, referring to the video from which the exhibition takes its name. The “she” in the title was a mysterious stranger in New York who walked up to Chan on the street back in 2017 and told her she needed to get herself to the sea rather than stay on river-bound Manhattan. ‘Gay icon’ Andy Warhol an ambassador for the new Saudi Arabia. Wait, what? The space will stay open for at least a couple of months, she says, though what visitors will find inside is likely to evolve now that she has entered a different phase in life. “At the end of the video you will see me rolling out from the cave to the sea. It’s kind of a metaphor for my path to healing. And I am literally living by the sea now. I have decided to move to Sai Kung [in Hong Kong’s east].”