Peter Hong-Tsun Chan: After-Images of a Golden Hour

The mind plays tricks. It strings memories together, cuts them into scenes, and lets one random image bleed into the next.

Peter Hong-Tsun Chan left Hong Kong for Canada as a kid, but the city stayed with him – in food, objects, colors, and especially movies. Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director whose late-’80s and ’90s films are full of smoke, neon, and people caught between staying and leaving, is everywhere here.

Six tiny diptychs, each only 10 inches tall, stack one image over another. They have the logic of memes and the feel of heartbreak. A house burns above a man lighting a cigarette. A lone motorcycle tears through a fluorescent tunnel above a close-up of a girl’s lips. The images come from Wong’s films; the editing is Chan’s.

If the diptychs are a fanboy elegy, the larger paintings turn inward. Here, Chan’s memories become stop-motion still lifes about time running out.

In The Final Frame of Play, a cardboard box sits in the middle of a lonely Canadian field. Inside, a television cuts to a scene from Wong’s Chungking Express: a woman dunking a toy airplane into a fish tank.

Scattered around it are a pineapple bun, lemon tea, playing cards, and newspapers. Things from home. Ordinary if you know that home. Strange if you don’t.

Look closely, and you’ll see a list of years. 1993 is circled. That was the year Chan’s family left. The painting doesn’t need to explain much more.

Peter Hong-Tsun Chan (b. Hong Kong, 1985) lives and works in Toronto. His family left Hong Kong for Canada in 1993, four years before sovereignty over Hong Kong was passed to China. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Arts from Sheridan College. In his paintings, Hong Kong becomes a recollection of the city he left behind and the images, flavors, objects, and films that still travel with him.