Refuge in Exile: Leung Chi Wo’s “Home and Nonhome”

I’ve always loved the sterile anonymity of hotel rooms. Here, I could be anyone. When I leave, all traces of me will dissipate in detergent and steam. 

I love the fakeness of the hotel cliché: “a home away from home.” It’s not, but out of politeness the host and the guest nod and smile and agree.

Leung Chi Wo knew he wanted to stage his latest solo show at a hotel, plumbing its domestic pretensions for an inquiry into “the immaterial and vacillating notion of home.” The result is a conceptually powerful evocation of transitory stasis—of retreating to a place you eventually must leave, and being unsure of how the world will have changed by the time that you do.

At the Eaton Hotel, Leung transformed two adjoining guestrooms into separate installations that blend into the cramped but cozy interiors. In Room 1 (2020), sleek white speakers proliferate, lining the TV shelf and cluttering the desk. Whispers emanate from every corner of the room, a sonic ectoplasm of those who might have stayed here. Holding the tubular speakers up to their ears, visitors hear humdrum recordings of people describing their living situations: an airline pilot adjusting to the small walk-up he moved into in 2005; a local photographer who listens to music while working in his living room.

In the adjoining space, a Mickey Mouse plushie with a steel helmet lies on the bed, while a custom contraption on the neighboring desk flips playing cards so quickly that it is impossible to make out their images. A self-portrait of the artist’s younger self is affixed to the bathroom mirror. These are emblems of nostalgia, recalling memories of outgrowing one’s childhood treasures, of needing to leave things behind.

Footage of the bustling city streets shot from the hotel window plays on the TV as interviewees narrate their future plans and their feelings about Hong Kong. Whereas the sound installation in Room 1 focuses on the experience of settling down, the video in Room 2, Home and Nonhome (2020), speaks instead of departure. “It feels [like] there is no choice but to leave although I would love to remain,” one remarks. Another says her parents once considered emigration, but the mother didn’t wish to abandon her extended family. Hong Kong’s year of exhausting, scuppered protest is never referred to by name, but its shadow looms large: “It’s hard not to feel the trauma of the city,” one person notes, “Its color is grey or green.”

Serif texts appear onscreen in interstitial moments of silence, sometimes reading as commentary on the class barriers that determine which Hong Kongers can leave. Other times they state the obvious—“Immigrants are different from displaced persons”—or provide historical context, delineating, for instance, the waves of emigration in the late 1960s and early ’80s during periods of political uncertainty and unrest. Home and Nonhome presents the musings of immigrants, and Hong Kong is an immigrant city. Exit strategies are our instinct.