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Hong Kong artist channels Leslie Cheung film Farewell My Concubine for intimate live show
Berlin-based Isaac Chong Wai’s all-male Hong Kong show An Intimate Surrender draws on the 1993 gender-fluid romance to explore vulnerability
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Head up to the third floor of JC Contemporary at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun arts and heritage centre and the first thing that hits you is a set of stage lights trained directly on the gallery entrance.
For a few seconds, visitors are caught in the limelight, like performers walking onto the stage for a production they did not know they had been cast in. It is a fitting prelude to An Intimate Surrender, artist Isaac Chong Wai’s first solo live-art commission in the city he grew up in.
The 36-year-old gay artist – who lives in Berlin and featured at the 2024 Venice Biennale and 2025 Taipei Biennial – says he has drawn heavily on Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige’s 1993 epic film Farewell My Concubine for his homecoming project.
The film, based on a novel by Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee Pik-wah, stars the late Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing as a Peking opera star who clings to his art and his passionate devotion to his male co-star amid political upheaval and war in 20th century China. It is a tale of the in-betweenness of reality and performance, and of identity.
For Chong, who was born in 1990, Cheung was a childhood idol and the first gay icon in a city with few visible queer role models. Cheung’s death on April 1, 2003, deeply affected the then 12-year-old artist.
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