A City’s Surreal Reality In Chow Chun Fai’s “Portraits from Behind"

The exhibition began with three self-portraits. June 12 2019 City Hall (2019), showing a teary-eyed Chow donning an N95 mask in front of a similarly masked crowd, marks the beginning of the protests and this body of work. Thousands gathered on June 12 to oppose a new bill allowing the transfer of alleged criminals to mainland China from Hong Kong, which has a semi-autonomous status following its retrocession from the United Kingdom. The event ended in intense confrontation between demonstrators and the police when tear gas was dispersed for crowd control, a precursor to the turbulence of the next months as the movement evolved into cries for universal suffrage following the withdrawal of the extradition bill.

The rest of the series, scattered around the spacious gallery, was like a scrambled puzzle that viewers had to assemble themselves. Renderings of anonymous protestors, police, and civilians, often with their backs shown, reflect the exhibition title, which suggests that the pro-democracy movement doesn’t have a single hero but numerous faceless proponents.

The violence that unfolded on the protests’ front lines pervades the paintings. The Chinese University of Hong Kong II (2020) records the on-campus conflict during mid-November, 2019, between protestors and police who respectively launched petrol bombs and tear gas at each other. The impressionistic piece details only the silhouettes of a group holding umbrellas—a symbol of the movement—against the splashes of chemicals hurled at them as they face soaring fires. The contrasting red and blue hues in the background amplifies the tension. This contrastive palette is similarly found in Chatham Road (2020), in which a section of the major road, absent of people, is engulfed in flames—offering a glimpse of a city on the verge of collapse.