A KINGDOM OF FLOWERS FOR MY MOTHER

A Kingdom of Flowers for My Mother is a project through which Chan works with 圍頭 (Waitau/Weitou) elders in Hong Kong, including her mother and aunties, to learn about their language, songs and customs. Literally meaning “walled village”, Waitau has often been dismissed within mainstream Hong Kong culture as the uneducated lower class. Chan’s work challenges these assumptions by foregrounding the richness of Waitau cultural traditions and the agrarian histories they carry. In particular, she is drawn to Waitau folk songs and stories as vital traces of local Hong Kong culture, and as repositories of women’s knowledge, memory and subtle resistance. In a society where literacy was largely reserved for men, oral traditions became a powerful means through which women preserved and shared experience. Through this project, Chan explores how women and migrant communities navigate loss, longing and imperfect acts of remembering.

At the centre of the work are stories passed down by Chan’s mother, who recalls her childhood with both tenderness and complexity. Although her family lived in poverty, she often speaks of the intimacy of agrarian life and the strength of family solidarity through hardship. One memory that deeply informs the project is her account of hand-making artificial flowers during Hong Kong’s plastics boom in the 1960s. Night after night, her family gathered around an oil lamp, assembling plastic and silk flowers for export to Europe. Payment came only after each gross (144 pieces) was completed. Chan returns to this story as a way of reflecting on labour, repetition and the bodily toll of survival, still marked in her mother’s memory by the callouses on her fingertips.

Drawing on these family conversations alongside Waitau folk songs, Chan restages these inherited memories through soft and tactile materials. The work seeks to restore presence and agency to her mother’s voice while considering the emotional texture of nostalgia, labour and migration. As part of this gesture, Chan has created 144 smoked latex flowers, inspired not by the mass-produced plastic flowers of export industries, but by the floral ornamentation found in Waitau architecture. With their flesh-like surface, the flowers return a sense of humanity to the artificial, while evoking the lives shaped by cultural displacement and economic exchange in the modern world.