Sexual fantasy, fan fiction, fairy tales: Hong Kong queer artists challenge norms

Folklore and fantasy can tell us a lot about reality. A highlight of Hong Kong’s art week, Hart Haus is hosting two new exhibitions by queer female artists who use escapist themes to offer their grounded reflections on modern society. On the third floor exhibition space at 12P Smithfield Road in Kennedy Town, Florence Lee Yuk-ki’s exhibition “Double Blue: An Altered Fairy Tale of Hong Kong (I)” is divided into “sky” and “sea” chapters. It is not a traditional happily ever after but a loose narrative of emotions and memories, with an open-ended conclusion. The entrance is dominated by Where Sight Sinks into Starlit Eyes (2025), a life-size replica of a section of an aircraft cabin with a six-channel, illustrated animation visible through the oval windows. From a passenger’s perspective, the Hong Kong skyline gives way to clouds before unfamiliar landscapes emerge. Fragments of the “Flying Chess” board game – a pre-smartphone staple for the city’s families – interrupt the journey on occasion, turning a childhood pastime into a metaphor for how arbitrary dice rolls can determine life paths. The uncertainty faced by the tens of thousands who left Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 social unrest is the genesis of the piece, curator Danson Wong says. Wong, who moved from Hong Kong to Taiwan in 2022, commissioned Lee for a 2025 exhibition in Taipei and asked her to reflect upon the many “emotional” partings that Hongkongers have witnessed in the past few years. Lee says she made good use of the opportunity, including the lower cost of fabricating a large 3D plane model in Taiwan, which would have been unaffordable in Hong Kong. It was also an example of how the production of art about Hong Kong can be sustained through friendship and shared resources. Lee says she wants to reveal the more nuanced trajectories at play for artists today. The second part of “Double Blue” shifts to the ocean, where the animation Where We Drift Until the Sea Forgets Us recasts the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” fairy tale through the eyes of fish. The piper leads them away from a claustrophobic home, described as lacking both freedom and physical space, into an undefined future. Legible as an allegory for mass migration, the video ends with fish thriving in water teeming with life, echoing Wong’s assertion that belonging is not a settled identity but a process of continual recalibration. A large fishing net suspended before the projection ties this narrative to the ebbs and flows of Hong Kong history. It belongs to Wong’s father, a fisherman from an indigenous boat-dwelling family. For this native community, the disruptive tide of modern development arrived early, and their way of life is now history. If the net represents a vanished past, the film’s construction looks to the future: the text was generated with artificial intelligence, which helped the project secure support from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s “arts tech” schemes. Still, Lee is ambivalent about the ubiquity of digital technology, saying she decided to draw the entire animation by hand and to exhibit works on paper in public for the first time. “This is emotional for me. Drawing on paper has always been a personal refuge.” On the ground floor, Tsui Hou-lam’s “Trichiasis” takes an ostensibly different subject – sexual fantasy, fan fiction and popular media – but approaches it with the same determination to generate new narratives. The title refers to a condition where eyelashes grow inward, irritating the eye. For Tsui, this minor bodily misalignment is a productive image: a small deviation from the norm that becomes impossible to ignore. Building on her focus on hangnails in an earlier exhibition, she uses a minor medical complaint to illustrate the daily frictions of non-conformity – irritations that patriarchal and heteronormative voices are all too quick to dismiss. Tsui’s exhibition centres on the video essay Girl’s S***: Trichiasis, which delves into the appeal of fan fiction and Boys’ Love (BL) culture for women seeking relief from their constrained social roles. Rather than dismissing these as guilty pleasures, Tsui treats them as routes to liberation and refusal. Both Lee and Tsui identify as queer female artists, and the two shows make for a potent display, in different ways, of how a universal survival strategy in today’s regressive, restrictive world is to be even more open to global connections and to finding allies. Tsui, who was also part of the 2025 Taipei exhibition, graduated from the master of fine arts programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024. She has already been on several overseas residencies and taken part in international film festivals since she began exhibiting her works in 2021. For “Trichiasis”, she draws on a spectrum of fringe and mainstream cultures as a call to arms against fixed, essentialist identities, from 1950s American lesbian pulp fiction to Japanese fujoshi (female fans of BL) subculture and late 20th century Hong Kong television dramas. By juxtaposing diverse sources, Tsui suggests the longing in contemporary fandom is part of an extended history of viewers reconfiguring the material they are given. Like Lee, Tsui has also been drawn to slow, material processes. Tsui handmakes large Marseille soap blocks onto which she transfers magazine photographs that then become obscured. These glitches represent the erosion of “perfect” images shaped by the male gaze and acknowledge that any identity constructed from media is partial and unstable. In a back storage room, the exhibition expands into an olfactory field of detergent powder and soap shards. The installation brings to mind the invisible, feminised labour of cleaning, and the restrictions placed on women in the name of purity. When discussing her feminist themes, Tsui points to a broader rollback of rights and the detention of women in mainland China for publishing BL comics. Together, these exhibitions propose an alternative to linear stories of decline or progress. Lee’s drifting fish and Tsui’s inward-turning eyelashes foreground marginal gestures: sideways movement, misalignment and the quiet re-editing of inherited narratives. By staging fantasy and memory as active tools, they suggest that resilience today lies in the fragile, continuing work of rewriting how a story is told. “Double Blue: An Altered Fairy Tale of Hong Kong (I)”, Hart Haus, 3/F, Cheung Hing Industrial Building, 12P Smithfield Road, Kennedy Town, 11am-6pm, Tue-Sun. Until April 7. “Trichiasis”, Hart Haus, G/F, Cheung Hing Industrial Building, 12P Smithfield Road, Kennedy Town, 2pm-6.30pm, Tue-Sun. Until April 8.

Sexual fantasy, fan fiction, fairy tales: Hong Kong queer artists challenge norms

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Two Hong Kong queer female artists explore fantasy and reality in exhibitions that challenge norms and reflect on identity and migration

Two Hong Kong queer female artists explore fantasy and reality in exhibitions that challenge norms and reflect on identity and migration