White Flower

Wai Ting Loretta Lau was born in British Hong Kong. She worked as a visual arts teacher for 7 years, witnessing big changes since Hong Kong handover to China from the UK colonization. In 2018, she established herself in Prague as a political performance artist. Her relocating made her join one of the most recent waves of diaspora of the post-80’s generation.

Her first performance on 4th June 2019 entitled “Letter to my people” in DOX – Centre For Contemporary Art, which pays tribute to Liu Xiao- bo, the only Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner, and to the deceased students who sacrificed their lives for the brighter future of humanity. The executor shaved her hair as a symbol of impending prison sentence. On 10th October 2019, she presented a public art performance – ‘Memory Eraser’ in the National Theater in Prague.

Recently, her projects comment with distinctive meditative-poetical methods on politically sensitive topics, spanning from the coronavirus crisis, through actual Hong Kong protests to the role of women in contemporary society. Her works are searching the boundaries between political and personal identities, which are now exhibiting throughout Europe and being collected by auction house Fabiani Arte in Italy.

Performance.

A performance commemorating a recent event in Hong Kong – Leung Kin Fai killed himself after injuring a police officer. A week after, when people came to mourn Leung Kin Fai, Hong Kong police officers marked mourning the attacker as an act backing terrorism. The seventh day after a person’s death is significant in traditional Chinese culture for it is believed that the spirit of the deceased returns home on that day. Nevertheless, as in other cases, officers ticketed a woman who took out a white flower to bow. What does it say about the decency of the newest political regime in Hong Kong?