Museum of the Lost: Leung Chi Wo + Sara Wong

"Museum of the Lost" features the collaborative works of Hong Kong artists Leung Chi Wo + Sara Wong. In its interplay between reality and fiction, He was lost yesterday and we found him today is a series of staged portraits in which the artists re-enact anonymous figures in old newspapers, pamphlets and other archival materials that they have been collecting for their on-going project Museum of the Lost. Selected materials from the archival collection, with fictional anecdotes written by the artists, will also be showcased. An imaginative investigation through staged photography, He was lost yesterday and we found him today is a series of 28 self portraits in which Leung and Wong re-enact anonymous figures picked out from images in the old magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, souvenir books and other documents that they have been collecting over the years for Museum of the Lost. In the process of interpreting images and researching their contexts, the artists invent the attitude and identity of each character they embody, resurrecting these lost figures from the grand narrative of history. Standing against a pure coloured void in the backdrop, the subjects remain unidentifiable in the near life-sized portraits, which heightens the sense of loss from which they are ostensibly restored. In reinventing the past through imagery and highlighting its inherent impossibility, the series addresses the fundamental questions about photography as a means of reproducing, reiterating and appropriating reality.For their parallel project-­in-­progress that inspired the photographic re-­enactment, Museum of the Lost, Leung and Wong write anecdotes that speculate on the real-­life identities and stories of the anonymous figures that feature in their collection of archival materials. As the fictive descriptions are based on research into historical events, the found objects and their anecdotes constituteanother dimension of the reinvented past in the staged photography series.