The Song of a Young Nutter is an on-going project on my emotional reflections towards obsolete restrictions and intense conflicts with the extended family from my father’s side since 2016, which is the year of my grandma’s departure. It also implicates the process of visual exploration on the discovery of self-identity, and that of the desire of healing from family traumas in memories.

My family relationship changed following the death of grandma in 2016, as a result of jealousy on my dad by his brothers and sisters for being the favorited son in grandma’s eyes. Since then, my parents and I have been excluded from the extended family and we have had no right to make decisions in family matters. We were not allowed to stay overnight or to have dinner at my grandparents’ home. This memory totally changed the concept of family to me and made me reconsider the definition of home.

The first part of the project was created in Hong Kong in 2020. I responded directly to the family conflicts by expressing my hard feelings of being an outsider of the family through the way of collaging images. I used my childhood traumatic experience as metaphors to question the meaning of family. By laughing at myself in the hazardous memories, I hope to express the sense of powerlessness with the encounter of cold violence brought by my family to me.

The second part of the project was created in London in 2021. I reflected more deeply on my personal emotions towards the continuous attacks by family pressures and turned them into photo collages in real scenes. The idea of images was inspired by a set of Chinese folktales called 24 Paragons of Filial Piety. I visualized my subversive fantasies towards the ridiculous situations and requests by my family to my parents and me. During the process of making, I found myself relieved from the arguments and they no longer bother me as much as them did in the past.

Fion Hung Ching-yan (b. 1993, Hong Kong) is a photo artist, who was born in a traditional Fujian family.

She had lived with her grandparents for many years when she was small and since then she realized that there’s a big generation gap between the family and her. Hung graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Hon) in Visual Arts degree from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University in 2016. Her work “To Be Used Someday” received a WMA Young Talents award in 2016.

Hung is primarily creating works based on photography, images and text. She has been focusing on the exploration of family relationships and resolving conflicts with Chinese cultures in the past few years. Hung has participated in recognised exhibitions, such as the Hong Kong Photo Festival 2020, FORMAT Photo Festival 2020 and Copenhagen Photo Festival 2020. Other works of hers were exhibited in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Germany, England, Denmark and Italy. She is currently undertaking her Master degree in Photography with London College of Communication, University of Arts London.

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