He penned his feelings of witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall. He lamented the pollution of a tourist area in Taiwan. He wrote about travelling with a bitter melon.
Five years after his passing, Leung Ping-kwan, whose pen name was Yasi, had a homecoming of sorts at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). In March this year, the exhibition Poetic Journeys in Foreign Lands paid tribute to the prolific poet, scholar and avant-garde artist through visual artworks transcending mediums, such as photography, collage and watercolour paintings.
The event was co-organised by the university’s General Education Unit, Department of Comparative Literature and the non-governmental organisation Read Cycling. In previous years, commemoration events devoted to the poet’s legacy were organised annually, with themes ranging from food to the city of Hong Kong. This year, however, things were slightly different: organisers invited students, graduates and the public to submit artworks in response to Yasi’s poems.
The poet, born in 1949, was not only an important literary figure in Hong Kong, but also a pioneer in the fields of Hong Kong literature and cultural studies. He taught at HKU’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, and subsequently at the Lingnan University. In 2006, he received a Medal of Honour by the government of Hong Kong.
For Fiona Law Yuk-wa, professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, there was no place better to host this tribute exhibition: “HKU is the first among all higher education institutions in Hong Kong to establish a curriculum focusing on Hong Kong culture and literature,” she said. “We want to remind students that this all came from an important Hong Kong writer [Yasi].”
Much of Yasi’s works dealt with his journeys abroad—and travelling is something that Hongkongers still resonate today. But the city remained at the heart of his writings. “The way Yasi wrote about travelling is really interesting. He’s not really describing how picturesque the scenery was. Every time he gave an account of the landscape, he’s discussing about the disparity and contrast between his and the destination’s cultures,” Law said.
This idea of having self-introspection through others was a recurring element in many of the featured artworks. Among which was a digital illustration and collage produced by Vicki Wong and Lesley Cheung Lai-sum. Their works were based on exchanged written descriptions each other wrote about their own rooms; in other words, while Wong illustrated what Cheung described her own room to be, Cheung put together a collage based on what Wong wrote about her room.
The pair took inspirations for their artworks from Yasi’s novel Paper Cut-outs (1977), which contained the line: “A room like this is like a foreign land to me.” For the duo, although they used personal language to describe spaces as intimate as their bedrooms, these spaces became estranged when being reinterpreted by others.
“We described our rooms using texts, and then we used another visual medium — be it illustrating or putting together paper scraps — to represent each other’s writings. It somehow felt like understanding a foreign land,” Cheung said.
Also on show was Katherine Lee Wai-yee’s collage. Different from Wong and Cheung, she attempted to understand Yasi’s take on foreign land through putting herself in the poet’s shoes.
Lee overlaid Yasi’s poem with writing papers; by cutting out pieces of the paper on top, she showed snippets of the poem behind. In the 1970s, Yasi became the editor of the magazine The Chinese Student Weekly. Lee said her creative process allowed her to experience how Yasi felt when he proofread submitted works as an editor.
“I made the wrong cuts repeatedly, so I had to check each character [of the poem] like proofreading a text,” she said.
Like Yasi, Lee herself works at the Chinese-language literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres. She layered the cut-outs with photographs she took of a rainy night in San Po Kong, where both offices of The Chinese Student Weekly and Fleurs des Lettres were located at. This was to imagine how Yasi felt when packing up his belongings after visiting the office for the last time, Lee said, since the Weekly ceased publication in 1974.
“Yasi planted seeds of writing in the city. Now, what he planted has probably allowed more people to know about Hong Kong literature, and travelled to other places,” she said.
Poetic Journeys in Foreign Lands was shown at Ground Floor Gallery, Run Run Shaw Building, Centennial Campus, HKU from February 26 to March 9.
