Untitled (Love for Sale)

Leung Chi Wo (b. 1968, Hong Kong) graduated with a BA in Fine Arts in 1990, and an MFA in 1997, both from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Leung Chi Wo’s reflective practice is concerned with the relationship between conception, perception, and understanding, especially in relation to site and history within cultural or political frameworks. Leung’s research interests include art, architecture, Hong Kong identity, and institutional critique.
Untitled (Love For Sale) (2014) consists of apparently unrelated visual elements about the Chinese diaspora, the civil rights movement in the United Kingdom, and the 1996 IRA terrorist attack in Manchester. When the viewer pushes a button (a gold sovereign coin minted in 1996 that depicts St. George killing the dragon on the visible side and Queen Elizabeth II on the other) it triggers a chain of actions: music plays, and a large column of stacked newspapers collapses before being reassembled via an electronic mechanism.
The viewer cannot see both elements together because they happen in separate parts of the installation, in different rooms. Next to the button, there is a light box and an engraving on aluminium that reads, ‘No politics today!’ – a quote from a Chinese student who shouted this when Taiwanese singer-songwriter Deserts Chang held up a Republic of China flag on stage during her live concert at the University of Manchester in 2003. The image on the light box is the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a venue for public meetings and political speeches as well as being a concert hall until 1996.
The Free Trade Hall was an original site of struggles for democracy but was later sold to a private developer and turned into a five-star hotel, with only part of the original façade remaining. In Leung’s installation, Love for Sale by Ella Fitzgerald can be heard. Fitzgerald last performed at the Free Trade Hall on 8 April 1964, where Love for Sale was recorded with the Oscar Peterson Trio.