Cici Wu

b. 1989, Beijing

In 2000, a fifteen-year-old autistic boy named Yu Man-hon ran away from his mother at a train station on Hong Kong’s Kowloon peninsula, sixteen miles from the border of Shenzen province in mainland China. Somehow, hours later, he crossed the border, without identification and with a diagnosed mental age of two. Without a passport, he was shuttled between immigration authorities and ultimately callously let go, both sets of authorities abdicating their duty of care. He was never seen again. The episode captivated public attention in China and came to symbolize the tension between the mainland and Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, which had just passed to Chinese rule in 1997, people worried about how the shift would impact everyday life; mass protests against growing Chinese totalitarianism and dictatorship have continued repeatedly since 1997. On the other hand, in Shenzen province, Hong Kong was seen as wealthy and insulated.1 The artist Cici Wu, an immigrant from Beijing growing up in Hong Kong, was eleven when Yu Man-hon went missing—old enough to know the simultaneous intimacy and separation between Hong Kong and mainland China. In her piece on Yu Man-hon, she resuscitates the boy himself from the moral and political tale his disappearance had become.

Wu’s work spans sculpture, installation, performance, video, and many other visual means. Rather than medium specificity, Wu’s works share an interest in themes of collective memory, multidimensional time, and histories of affect and emotion. The Unfinished Return of Yu Man-hon (2019) is a film surrounded by an installation of found and carefully wrought objects, mostly made of paper.2 In the film, the figure of Yu Man-hon is seen wandering through different sites—on a ferry, in a marketplace, at a bus depot. Whether these scenes imagine the boy’s days after his disappearance or conjure a enlightened celestial being is left indeterminate.3

The ritual space of the installation is strewn with offerings: paper lanterns, glowing lamps, and small animal sculptures. Among these are also works on paper like The Disappearance of Yu Man-hon (storyboard 02) (2017), printed with the word “wind” in small letters (other storyboard works feature words like “hope” and “justice”) [PL. 34]. These sheets of paper recall joss offerings, used in ancestral worship to send the spirit to another dimension and afterlife. They align Yu Man-hon with the natural elements (wind), granting him elemental power and presenting ritualized harmony and peace as the true horizon of justice for his case. —ECF

1 Carol A. G. Jones, ed., “The Disappearance of Yu Man-hon,” in Lost in China?: Law, Culture and Identity in Post-1997 Hong Kong, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 114–40.

2 Billy Tang, “Poetic Justice for Yu Man-hon: Cici Wu,” Mousse, October 13, 2010, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/cici-wu-billy-tang-2020/.

3 In the press release for this project and exhibition, Wu specificied that the film constructed a non-ghostly perspective.