Cici Wu

Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon

Unfinished Return by Cici Wu is delicate, but physically much more robust than Cici Wu’s earlier works. What continues is the sense of longing, of something unresolved; it is haunting, like the images from a dream that we try to remember upon waking up.

Unfinished Return revolves around the story of a developmentally challenged young boy, who purportedly disappeared during the handover of Hong Kong by the British to Chinese governance. Presented as a visual narrative, the abstract fictive story is told through unfolding visuals in a projection, which is accompanied by a curious object placed on the floor near the screen. This prop — an amalgam from the detritus of commercial movie industry sets — amplifies the questions Wu raises about reality and dreams. How close is the imaginary as told in cinema, to actual historical events? How do we know or understand what are facts and what is truth? In this day and age of fabricated news, who takes the time to get to the bottom of a story fed through superficially and inaccurately reported blogs?