The focus of the main room is an animated short encapsulating Wong’s favorite themes. Rendered in a jerky, neon-bright Cubist style that characterizes his work, Wong’s video tells the story of an impotent animator whose wife starts working at home as a prostitute, partly to support her unemployed husband, and partfly to satisfy herself sexually. In his narration, the animated protagonist explains that he tried to wait in parks and other public spaces while his wife saw customers, but that the city itself wouldn’t let him rest. At least at home there is air-conditioning and Wi-Fi, the husband drolly comments as the animation shows him crouched in a closet staring at his smartphone. These details, more than the mentioning of specific landmarks, felt genuinely rooted in Hong Kong life. When an undercover cop takes advantage of his power to enjoy the wife’s services for free, the video turns into a bizarre revenge fantasy, unravelling a sequence of events that also raises questions about the animator’s sexuality. Though filled with crude humor, the short animation touches upon important themes, challenging sexual norms and lamenting the trials of life in a cramped city.

A similar synthesis of the crass and thoughtful is present in a neon sign displayed in a side room of the gallery. Multicolored lights form the outline of a seated man, who incongruously has pig’s trotters for feet, and whose penis is rendered as a palm tree, apparently providing some shade. It is ridiculous—and yet the illumination evokes Hong Kong’s iconic, and increasingly disappearing, neon signs as well as the bare fluorescent lights that advertise massage parlors. The installation brings to the surface questions about gentrification and urban change in Sham Shui Po, and Hong Kong in general, while simultaneously parodying images of masculine power.