Is Being a Pollyanna Really Such a Bad Thing?

As the door opens to WMA Space, an independent art space tucked inside a nondescript commercial building in Sheung Wan, it’s briefly unclear who will come out: Doris Wong Wai-yin — the artist — or Pollyanna. After all, the meeting was arranged with @pollyannafromhk over Instagram. It is Wong who finally appears.

The artist’s Pollyanna and Glad Town is the opening salvo of WMA Space’s new Hope programme, a theme selected by the art space’s board. Wong’s proposal was one of two selected from 485 submissions from around the world.

It wasn’t a given. In fact, when Wong first heard of the theme, she’d recoiled in discomfort. Hong Kong, she says, has been through “a lot” in recent years. “What if there is residual anger?” she asks. “Personally, I’ve had friends who moved away with their families. What is there to be hopeful about? Yet the word nagged at her in the days after. “When we’re among friends, we are told not to fong3 fu6 (放負),” she says, using the Cantonese slang for giving off negative energy. “When something bad happens, people say: let’s move on. That’s always that pressure to stay positive. But what if we aren’t ready to? I started thinking — can one go on living without hope?”

During her quest to find out more, Wong came across what psychologists Margaret Matlin and David Stang coined the Pollyanna principle in 1970: the human tendency to focus on positive experiences and look forward rather than back, a mental bias that helps people continue with everyday life. The name comes from Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel Pollyanna, whose orphaned heroine always managed to find something to be optimistic about in every situation. 

Today, the word carries a more complicated meaning, where a Pollyanna usually denotes somebody who exhibits a kind of naïve optimism. Wong’s version of Pollyanna is a bit more ambiguous. “A to Z From Hope” (2025) is a 26-Instagram reels series organised around the letters of the English alphabet. In it, Pollyanna wanders the streets of a fictional town called Glad Town, where people spit in public, close elevator doors in strangers’ faces and behave with casual disregard for others. Despite her determination to remain cheerful, Pollyanna becomes increasingly irritated.

“These are things that have happened to me,” Wong says with a dry laugh. “In a way, I am sort of a Pollyanna. I just couldn’t stay a Pollyanna. How could I, when I have the lift door shut in my face?” 

To construct Pollyanna’s social media persona, Wong immersed herself in the mechanics of social media, enrolling in a course on Instagram photography and engaging a social madia marketing agency. “I mean, nothing is organic about what you see on social media,” she says. “There are quite strict rules about what works. The rhythm of the videos, their length, the colours that attract attention.”

The experiment also led her to AI image generators, a technology that has unsettled many artists. “I’m of two minds about it,” she says. “AI doesn’t have an ego. It doesn’t throw tantrums. It doesn’t run out of energy.” AI prompted a sobering realisation, however, when it suggested narrowing Pollyanna’s waist and lengthening her legs. “I mean, how unacceptable,” says Wong. “After all the waves of feminist movements.”

Wong is fascinated by the way images circulate and proliferate online. We see more images today than at any other time in history, notes the artist, who wanted to understand how images are generated for social media consumption. At the same time, she remains uneasy about the influence of screen culture on the art world. “When some art spaces consider which artists to show, they look at how many followers the artist has, whether the work is photogenic and so on,” she says, incredulous. “As an artist, I cannot let myself create work where the priority is whether it’s social-media worthy.”

Ironically, Pollyanna and Glad Town may be her most photogenic exhibition yet. If you look at old Pollyanna book covers, Pollyanna isn’t always dressed in pink, nor does the book mention that pink is her favourite colour. But Wong’s space is saturated in pink. Pink carpet and curtains envelop the room, with pink neon signs glowing against the walls. A red balloon has been spray painted against the pink wall. 

Pink has a multi-layered socio-cultural history. A simple example is how it’s been gendered over the years. In the US, pink was historically a male colour before the 1940s, when manufacturers and advertisers decided it was a feminine colour, according to research by American professor Jo Paoletti. Some American football teams, most famously at the University of Iowa, have painted visiting locker rooms pink to demotivate opponents, due to the colour’s association with femininity. It has also been associated with LGBTQ+ activism, something explored in the second video piece at the show, “Less Than Red More Than White.” 

Narrated by Pollyanna, the vertical video weaves reflections on pink’s complex history with her own crumbling sense of hope. One day, leaving a shop with her hands full, she stood behind a man who, instead of holding the door, kept scrolling on his phone, and expected her to open it for him. “To say I have hope is to lie to you,” she remarks, uncharacteristically of Pollyanna. The narration is paired with visuals that flicker and glitch, the opposite of the polished, seamless aesthetics common on social media, mirroring hope faltering in the face of thoughtlessness from those around her. 

The artist’s exploration of the colour pink and cultural histories of colour doesn’t end with the show. Wong says she is creating a series that examines how different colours can carry layers of emotional and social meanings. At Art Basel Hong Kong, Wong is presenting Pollyanna and the Glad Fair, a series of works including videos and installation works exploring the colour pink. One piece is a photo booth where visitors can take a selfie, which is then printed onto an exhibition brochure. In an era when such leaflets are rarely read, Wong says “seeing one’s own face on the page may be the only way to get visitors to engage with the exhibition.”

Back at WMA space, sitting in one of the cinema seats and basking in the pink glow, one almost feels lighter — happier, even — until the spell is broken. One Saturday afternoon, a small group of visitors were being shepherded around the gallery by three performance artists. At each stop, they posed a situational question along the lines of: “If this terrible thing happened, how would you feel?” Regardless of the answer, they started chanting “Hope, hope, hope.” After 10 minutes, the word begins to feel hollow. Initiated by curator Orlean Lai, the intervention, titled “hope nope hope,” will run on 15 March, 26 March and 25 April. 

The show isn’t the first time Wong has critiqued the idea of blind optimism. In “Clearing ten thorns,” exhibited at Spring Workshop in 2016, she stomped on different types of food while words or phrases flashed across a screen. One of these phrases was “positive psychology,” which could “oversimplify” situations or traumas, according to the artist. “People always say that if you want to stay positive you should avoid the news, avoid negativity,” she says. “But does that mean I should live in a cave? I don’t believe in turning my back on the world.”

That tension between engagement and skepticism runs through Wong’s art. Often casting a wry eye on the absurdities of everyday life, the artist’s works can feel a bit whimsical, even a little random, yet beneath all that lie a certain conviction about art and life. Asked why she believes she is a Pollyanna despite her cynicism, she answers, “I still believe human beings are innately good. I’ve never encountered a Pollyanna in real life — but it’s hard to explain that belief. It’s just faith I suppose.” 

And it’s that stubborn impulse to keep believing in people, even while documenting the many ways they disappoint, that makes Wong’s work worthwhile to look at.

Pollyanna and the Glad Town runs until 26 April 2026. Pollyanna and the Glad Fair runs at Art Basel Hong Kong from 27–29 March 2026.