Chloë Cheuk’s Tale of Two Cities

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is a confusing place. It occupies a central location in the Golden Square Mile, a neighbourhood once home to beer barons and fur magnates, which is now filled with apartment towers, hotels and offices. But Canada’s oldest and largest art museum does not occupy a single monumental structure. Instead, it has spread from its original 1870 edifice to a discreet collection of purpose-built pavilions and refashioned old buildings, including a Romanesque church and an Edwardian apartment building, all connected by underground passageways and exhibition halls. 

“It took me one week to learn how to navigate,” says Hong Kong-born artist Chloë Cheuk as she glides effortlessly through the maze. Curators, security guards and conservators nod hello as she makes her way up to her office in the bowels of the museum, next to the conservation labs where artworks are meticulously analysed and restored. 

If you recognise Cheuk’s name, it’s probably because she has held a number of exhibitions in Hong Kong, including the recent down to earth (exhale) at 1a space, a mid-career survey that brought together sculpture, video and other works that explored the ongoing evolution of her artistic practice. The show was accompanied by her first monograph, Chloë Cheuk: In Search of Completeness.

Cheuk’s fans find her work compelling because it turns ordinary things — balloons, toothbrushes, coins, telephones, light bulbs, cloakroom tags — into precise emotional instruments. Her objects are often simple, even modest, but they hold unstable states: longing, dependence, guilt, intimacy, rupture, displacement. “Kinesis and catharsis pulse through Cheuk and her works like inhalation and exhalation,” writes Christina YZ Chung writes in Cheuk’s monograph. What makes her practice significant is that movement is never only mechanical, but emotional, social and biographical.

That movement is literal in the most personal sense. In 2016, Cheuk left Hong Kong for Montreal, where she has been based for the past 10 years. She first arrived to complete a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree at Concordia University, which had just the right combination of affordable tuition, good reputation and distance from Hong Kong. In particular, Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts is known for its research–creation methodology, which has had a profound impact on the way Cheuk thinks about art.

“Research in Hong Kong is not as much of a thing,” she explains. “It’s more about selling. I was in a gallery, but the gallery didn’t talk about research. I’m more of a thinker–maker. That’s a bit different from Hong Kong art and art education.”

Uprooted and reconnected

It hasn’t been an easy decade for Cheuk, who was born in 1989 and grew up in Tsuen Wan. She has had to navigate a new city where most people speak French, a language she has struggled to learn; a city with a sometimes radically different mentality to that of Hong Kong. She faced the precariousness of being a migrant in a country that can sometimes feel like it has welcomed you through the front door, only to find out all the other doors in the house are locked. She needed to work odd jobs to get by, including a stint in a doughnut shop. And Cheuk was confronted by a city shaped by the extremes of its climate: hot and humid in summer, cold and extravagantly snowy in winter. “Winter blues are real,” she once told Hong Kong curator Yang Yeung when she visited Cheuk in Montreal.

All of this has shaped Cheuk’s art in ways she could never have expected. “It forced me to think,” she says. 

Cheuk was a creative kid who loved to paint. She applied to the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media because she wanted to explore other kinds of art. “At the time, I didn’t even know what media art is,” she says. (Media art refers to experimental interdisciplinary art that combines many different mediums.) “I never even knew there were living artists. I thought all artists were dead,” she adds, laughing. “I was so naïve.”

It turned out that not only were artists alive, they were her instructors, including new media composer and installation artist Samson Young. “He taught me a lot about electronics,” says Cheuk. “He also taught a class about research, but at the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Until I came here.”

Cheuk’s time at CityU taught her to become a maker: she could do her own electrical wiring and make her own installations. She would go to Shanghai Street and scour hardware stores and building supply shops for materials. 

Montreal was different. Far from the world’s centre of production in China, the city’s supply of materials is more limited. “If you go to Shanghai Street, you can find 20 different kinds of hinges,” says Cheuk, sitting in a café near the museum in Montreal. “Here, you go to Home Depot and there’s maybe four. I thought, ‘With this limited material, how can I make art?’” It was an opportunity to develop the more conceptual side of her work. 

Before leaving for Montreal, Cheuk had staged three solo exhibitions in 2015: She, herself at Things That Can Happen and After Blossom at 100ft PARK — both venues in Sham Shui Po that are now defunct — along with Every Every, Fuse: A.I.R. at Videotage and A Little Bit Different at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland. Her most recognisable works are often tightly composed kinetic or video pieces that translated emotional states into simple mechanical or circular actions. 

In her CityU graduation work, “The Burst of Pleasure” (2012), a balloon slowly inflated over a birthday cake until, at an unpredictable moment, it hit a pin and bursts into confetti. “Since We Last Met” (2015) consisted of two cups, two toothbrushes, one rotating mechanism, and a recurring moment of contact; it was described by Blindspot, Cheuk’s gallery at the time, as an allegory of relationality in which the circular motion of the toothbrushes creates “a lingering moment of intimacy and struggle” before they separate again.

In Montreal, Cheuk began a project called “Homeless.” Conceived through exchanges with the city’s unhoused community, it used Canadian coins gathered through those encounters to ask how value changes according to social position. Cheuk later told Ocula magazine that the work comes from feeling low after relocating, and from learning to move from self-pity toward empathy.

The project continued to evolve, with a new iteration presented at the 2019 show Exit Strategies exhibition at H Queen’s. She paired “Homeless” with another new work called “Long Gone” (2019), in which a transparent 3D-printed telephone dangled from its hook, evoking unresolved communication and lack of closure. Together, they were not necessarily a break in form — Cheuk was still using minimal objects, emotional tension and absence — but indicated a widening of scale and subject as she absorbed the consequences of living elsewhere. 

Since then, her works still carry her characteristic precision, but the emotional centre has moved from the drama of two things touching or separating, towards the larger question of what it means to be displaced, to disappear and to remain unclosed.

To stay or to go

It has taken a long time for Cheuk to break into Canada’s notoriously insular art world. It didn’t help that she had some bad luck: her first solo show in Montreal opened just before the city was plunged into its first Covid-19 lockdown. 

“Why do I sacrifice so much and stay in Canada?” she remembers asking herself. The answer: “I just feel the experience that I started, I need to finish it in order to learn something from it.” 

That was made clear in 2021, when she was offered a HK$1 million commission by the Hong Kong Palace Museum, which would open the following year. She turned it down because it would have meant staying in Hong Kong, letting her Canadian visa lapse and eliminating the possibility of becoming a permanent resident. “It was like a test,” she recalls. “Chloë, are you willing to sacrifice one million dollars to live in Canada?”

She had good reasons to stay, even if it means her artistic career wouldn’t be as straightforward as it might be in Hong Kong. “Montreal is less capitalist than Hong Kong,” she notes. “I can breathe here.” 

Cheuk has been alarmed to see how the booming art market has reshaped Hong Kong’s creative ecosystem; art has never been more present in the city, but it is always oriented around its commercial value. By contrast, most art in Canada is made with the help of government grants and other public subsidies. “Without the art market here, you can see the work is very different, in terms of how committed [artists] are, in terms of experimentation,” she says. “My work, my process here, people love it. But Hong Kong people don’t want to see it.”

That became clear after down to earth (exhale). Some people saw the works on display as unfinished — which is true, because they’re meant to reflect the ongoing evolution of Cheuk’s thinking and methodology. It’s the kind of thing that makes audiences in Montreal excited but leaves many in Hong Kong befuddled.

“In the beginning, I still was able to deliver something like what they consider good art in Hong Kong,” says Cheuk. “But slowly, the more time I spend here, I feel I’m losing that. The gap is wider. In Hong Kong, there’s no room for process.”

Two months to think

Cheuk’s residency at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is a case in point. Known as the Impressions Residency in English and the Résidence Empreintes in French, it’s awarded to Montreal artists from immigrant communities, giving them eight weeks of full access to the museum and C$9,000 (about HK$50,000) in support. And it comes with no obligation to produce any work; it’s just an opportunity to explore and reflect.

After having made her way through the labyrinth of the museum, Cheuk is sitting in her temporary office. She is a diminutive but voluble woman. “I talk a lot,” she says with a self-effacing laugh. But she is anything except a haughty intellectual who loves the sound of her own voice. She is inquisitive and self-reflective, constantly working through the thoughts that occupy her mind from morning to night. Cheuk has characterised her own practice as “undisciplinary”; in her work, formal artistic practice, philosophy and emotion are all intertwined. 

Cheuk entered the Impressions Residency with the idea of looking not at art objects but everything around them. To illustrate this point, she pulls up a series of photos on her laptop that depict a shared tablet at Concordia, where she works part-time in a production lab at the art school where she did her MFA. Like a digital detective, she photographed each tablet in a way that brings out the fingerprints of everyone who has been using it. 

The idea stemmed from watching the 2019 protests in Hong Kong from afar. “I noticed that, after people painted slogans on the street, cleaning people would come and wash them off, but there would still be traces,” she says. “I thought to how it’s related to conservation, what to keep, what to erase, stuff like that. And then later I kept thinking, ‘How does this relate to me?’ And it reminded me of a Polaroid taken on my birthday.”

It was an old family photograph from the 1990s that had been covered in stickers. She had her mother send it over urgently from Tsuen Wan by SpeedPost. When it arrived, in the distinctive green and purple Hongkong Post envelope, she didn’t open it. “I want the conservation team to look at it first,” she says. 

But she already knew what the photo looked like: Cheuk had previously posted a digital shot of the old Polaroid on her Facebook. It was deformed by the stickers and damaged by time; her sister and parents were hard to make out. One of her Facebook friends — somebody she doesn’t actually know — took the liberty of using AI to reconstitute the old photo. The result is uncanny. Her mother looks different; her sister too.

“And me!” exclaims Cheuk. “My eyes look bigger. Their shape is different.”

Cheuk was perturbed but curious. “What problem does this photo solve?” wrote Cheuk in reply to the AI-generated touchup on Facebook. The man who shared it never replied. 

New material

Two weeks later, Cheuk is back in her office, reading an official report prepared by the MMFA’s conservators. They had delicately opened the envelope and analysed the sticker-clad Polaroid as if it were a fine work of art. 

The report is written in English on a French template. “Family Photograph, circa 1990s,” reads the report. “Matériaux: Dye diffusion print, dye coupling (chromogenic) print and pressure sensitive tape. Évaluation de l’état: Poor condition. Object cannot be displayed without stabilization. Handle with care.”

Cheuk hasn’t yet processed the implications of her old family photo being treated so seriously. But it’s only part of her exploration of the inner workings of the MMFA. “I keep bugging people,” she says, chuckling. Security guards, operations staff, cloakroom staff, conservators — they’ve all been subjected to her questions. They’re the key to what the museum usually hides: repair, damage, condition reports, protocols, security observations and the labour that makes artworks appear stable and untouched. 

“I’m interested in systems,” says Cheuk. “Inside the system, how can I empathise? And then there’s all this invisible labour behind — their job is to make things, their work invisible.” 

Chloë’s future

So here’s a very Hong Kong question: what will the residency produce? It’s hard to say at the moment. But Cheuk definitely has some ideas. There might be something related to that old Polaroid. There might be a new piece related to a staircase in the 1991 MMFA pavilion designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, which was created in a way intended to slow people down. 

“People treat it like it’s a usual staircase, but I would say it’s a work of art,” says Cheuk. “People need to adjust their body to the stairs. But there’s no tag, no sign saying this is something special. People just think it’s weird. Is it an art piece or is it functional?” 

In her office, Cheuk shows a video of MMFA staff doing a bit of improvised choreography on the staircase. This could end up being Cheuk’s first piece of performance art. But we’ll see. In the right environment, everything is possible — and everything can be an experiment.