Hearsay always arrives second-hand, whether through overheard stories, faded photographs or the grainy glow of a television set. In From Hong Kong With Love, Adrian Wong offers an exploration of family biography through a classic melodrama as well as a supernatural tale. Yet at its core is the challenge of reconstructing the lives of those we loved but never really knew. How stories are passed down half-remembered — and in all likelihood embroidered in the telling — serves as fertile ground for Wong’s foray into television as method.
From Hong Kong With Love, which runs at Oi! until August 31, presents itself as a retro sequence of TV sets, lush and yet hinting at the uncanny order of memory. The sparsely furnished entrance space, with the plastic stools and folding tables of an open-air eatery, gives way to a corridor outside a modest flat, complete with clothes on the line and a bicycle against the wall. Peering in, one sees bunk beds and period appliances in a working-class bedroom. Further along is a well-to-do 1970s-themed living room with Chinese curios and family photographs – at once suggestive of a Chinese estate and a suburban American home.
Each set was in fact reconstructed from the artist’s shoot, where he hired a professional TV cast and crew to shoot footage for episodes of a TV drama. While these sets physically make up the exhibition, they also served as backdrops for the two episodes of a television drama presented here.
Family fantasy
The first episode tells the story of a young woman in a poor family who caught the eye of a wealthy scion. Marrying into the family as a concubine — the man having already tied the knot in an arranged marriage — changed the course of her life, with hitherto unheard-of luxury and the ability to provide for her family. Yet it also brought her great sadness, including being cut off from her birth family, not even allowed to return home to see her dying father.
On one level, From Hong Kong With Love is the story of familial absence: that of Adrian Wong’s grandmother – remote, elegant, enigmatic. The artist remembered this stately figure inhabiting the lower level of the family home in suburban Chicago. “My memory could be faulty,” he says, “but every morning, my grandmother would wake up and put on a proper gown – like, a ball gown. She would look like a movie star.”
Only after her death did Wong discover the notes she had kept – an archive of scribbled annotations decoding the soap dramas which she had watched obsessively despite not speaking nor understanding English. It turned out these annotations had also fused with recollections from her own life. “The parts that were comprehensible were fragments of her recollections,” he explains.
To flesh out the story, he embarked on a series of interviews, with older cousins, surviving aunts and uncles, and especially his mother. He visited the family’s ancestral home in Zhuhai, now surrounded by car repair shops. With warped memories and contradictory details, what results is a collage. Parallel trajectories are presented in these first two episodes: the first is grounded in oral memory, while the second plays with the reliability of family legend through the genre of a TV vampire tale.
In this second episode, the first wife of the wealthy scion does not accept fate in the margins. According to what Wong understands, in real life, she simply accepted the role of the manager of the household. In the fictional story, she instead becomes a vengeful, spectral matriarch who calls into question the injustices of arranged marriages. Together, the two episodes meditate on what can be known and what must be invented. “The show really is centred on the impossibility of actually verifying or telling a truthful, documentary-style story,” Wong reflects.
A spy’s perspective
Such excavations of family history — particularly Wong’s relationship with the entertainment industry — can be seen in the artist’s earlier works. His 2006–07 project Calvin’s Corner began with a search for his great uncle Ka Ming Suk Suk, a television personality and one of the first people ever broadcast on Hong Kong television. His research unearthed deeper complications. It turned out Wong’s own father was the illegitimate son of a well-known entertainer. “Many of the people in the direct lineage to my grandfather have to this day refused to meet me,” he says.
Wong’s approach also comes with a difference – looking at Hong Kong from a different angle. “A lot of times I feel like I’m a spy,” he says. “I’m given access to certain things because of my lineage – the fact that I’m ethnically Hong Kong Chinese, but not by lived experience.”
First arriving in Hong Kong in the 2000s before becoming a fixture of the Hong Kong art scene, Wong was struck by Hong Kong’s visual intensity. Whereas many Hong Kong artists – particularly those emerging from the Chinese University of Hong Kong – often adopted a contemplative minimalism, Wong’s practice veered towards maximalism. “I leaned into it,” he says. “I grew up in a sleepy suburb of Chicago. This was something else entirely.”
In the project The Tiger Returns to the Mountain, he rebuilt fragments of Tiger Balm Garden, complete with animatronic tigers and faux rocks. “Tiger Balm Garden as a place is an emblematic project because it looks at Hong Kong as a site of exoticisation,” he explains. “There’s a resonance to it, and it’s so embedded in the way people see the space. And I think there’s a kind of authenticity to the inauthenticity of places like that.”
Maximalism revisited
In a way, From Hong Kong With Love revisits this register. The visual richness of the sets contrast with actual, historic TVB dramas, which often have a spartan, almost theatre-like simplicity. “We didn’t want it to read as theatre, but maybe this is a little overproduced,” he smiles.
Alongside the two core episodes shown in From Hong Kong With Love, a third episode is currently being developed through a public workshop. A fourth, structured around kung fu and drawn from his paternal lineage, will meanwhile debut at the Singapore Biennial later this year.
With this kung fu episode, Wong draws from an approach that dates back to earlier days in the Hong Kong film industry, when hundreds of films were churned out a year. It also pays homage to his paternal grandfather, a prolific composer for Shaw Studios who worked on many films, many of them structured around music and action, not script.
“They’d choreograph the fight scenes to the soundtracks my grandfather would produce,” says Wong. “Once the action scenes were filmed, they would shoot interstitial shots – people having conversations over dinner, running from left to right, then right to left. There’d be slaps, arguments, love scenes, all shot with no context. Then editors would receive a bunch of random scenes and piece them together into a film. Once that was done, they’d write the dialogue, retroactively apply a script, and then foley the entire thing.” (Foley is a film industry term referring to the creation of sound effects.)
Wong’s new kung fu episode adopts that strategy: the footage is shot before the music is composed, and then comes the story. This reversal — building the action first, then composing the story — mirrors the project’s deeper impulse: how to make meaning from fragments. In a narrative shaped by everyday mythologies and family half-truths, there needs to be both an intuition and a distance: like a kung fu sequence scored after the fact, the past might be felt before it is ever fully known.
From Hong Kong With Love runs at Oi! until August 31, 2025. Click here for more information.