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Photo by HUNG Ching-yan, Fion
Fion Hung Ching-Yan, was raised in Hong Kong, but most of her family members were migrants from different parts of China and they started life in Hong Kong not long before Ching-Yan was born.
Because of these strong Chinese roots, her homelife is greatly influenced by Chinese tradition. This affects the education of the younger generations – children must follow the rules set by the adults in order to express loyalty to the family.
Ching-Yan noticed that these kind of conservative family values were all around her and felt she couldn’t fit into this culture as so many of the rules seemed to be nonsense and unnecessary. Ching-Yan couldn’t explain why it felt “wrong” to live in a way that people have been practicing in her culture, but she had an idea about why her attitude differed from that of her family.
The change happened when she started to meet friends from different cultures. Their social mores were totally different from her own culture and she found herself being more comfortable with them even though they were from totally different backgrounds.
She realized that her cultural background had been limiting her life in way that she didn’t really enjoy. But she was also aware that this kind of social control had shaped her character and values, and affected her way of seeing the world. This realisation led to the work The Song of a Young Nutter, which is about how she found herself to be an outsider in her home country.
In order to express this complex feeling, she used some of her weird and ridiculous childhood memories to create scenes in her photography as ironic metaphors for her feelings. She created an easy and funny series of work, laughing at herself for being so unsuited for this society.
The Song of a Young Nutter by Fion Hung Ching-Yan.
