Dion Leung
Dion does not know how to lie. This 26-year-old artist distinguished herself in 2022 by exhibiting in her home city at the Hong Kong International Photo Festival APAPPAN. In this context, she addressed with striking realism her lived experience during the COVID-19 period. Today, she discusses the future of her region in this exhibition. “A borrowed place, a borrowed time,” they once said. A phrase long associated with Hong Kong, it now seems to go beyond mere metaphor and become a lived experience. Perhaps we, as Hongkongers, are like an empty boat drifting at sea — without crew or rudder, carried by a current whose direction escapes us.
Drifting is not only a movement, but a condition. It implies the absence of choice, the loss of orientation, the inability to name a clear future. Moving forward no longer means progressing, but simply continuing to float, to remain on the surface. Time stretches, space transforms, and what once seemed stable becomes provisional.
The images in Drifting observe this state of suspension through quiet places, often empty, situated at the margins of human activity. Landscapes, architecture, and infrastructure appear as in-between spaces: neither fully inhabited nor entirely abandoned. The absence of human figures is not a denial of presence, but another way of suggesting it — through traces, structures, and silence.
The project does not seek to document an event or construct an explicit narrative. It unfolds within a slow, attentive, almost immobile temporality. The photographs leave room for uncertainty, inviting the viewer to drift in turn, without imposed direction. What is shown matters as much as what remains outside the frame.
Drifting thus questions what it means to inhabit a territory when anchorage becomes fragile, when belonging turns into waiting, and when identity is shaped by movement rather than stability. More than a project about a specific place, it is a reflection on a contemporary collective condition — that of existing in the interval, between here and elsewhere, between present and future.
Perhaps we, as Hongkongers, are like an empty boat drifting offshore. Without a clear heading, without knowing where we are going, we are nothing more than an empty vessel carried by the current.
Dion Leung