Leung Chi Wo

About Leung Chi Wo + Sara Wong’s “He Was Lost Yesterday and we Found Him Today,”

c-prints
100 x 150cm
2011

Reviewing photo images from the mass media, Leung ＋ Wong contemplate the presence of all those unidentified minor figures or those who were accidentally captured for a grander narrative. But Roland Barthes’ noeme of photography suggests that anyone who was photographed, no matter how minor s/he was, must have been there. Although we don’t know them at all, they have already occupied a place in our past. By posing as those who appeared in the found images, Leung ＋ Wong challenge the authority of the grand narrative portrayed by the media on one hand; and also shed light on the poetics of photography through their own presence in the newly studio-shot photograph. The impossibility to identify an unidentified person in the past has become the artists’ romantic encounter with the history in a most humble but vivid way.