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©2026 Stephanie Chung
Phantom of the Fountain (2026)
Curated by Stephanie Chung
Featuring works by Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, Christie Lau, and Jess Lau Ching-wa
Saxophone by Alvin Wong
Composition & Co-produced by Aaron Chung
Sun, 5 July 2026, 1.30pm
Theatreship , Canary Whard, London
The event is accompanied by a zine Phantom of the Fountain,
edited & designed by Stephanie Chung
Still image from A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella (2024), Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee. Courtesy of the artist.
Phantom of the Fountain contemplates the recurrence of a specific fountain as a motif in the short films by Hong Kong artists — Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, Christie Lau, and Jess Lau Ching-wa. The four moving image works are interwoven with a score composed by Aaron Chung and performed live on saxophone by Alvin Wong, to form a collective reimagining of the fountain as a phantasmic presence.
Entangled with colonial legacy, collective memory, diasporic nostalgia, the fountain — as both a place and an image — evokes the ambivalent feelings of detachment and attachment to the city. Informed by encounters with public and personal archival images, the works see the largely decorative architecture morph into a landmark, the backdrop of family memories, a vestige of the city’s coloniality — a subject more meaningful in image than in its architectural materiality.
The works collectively allude to the paradoxical coexistence of the fugitive materiality of the image and its lingering presence in our collective memory, inviting contemplation of what melody might accompany this fountain imagery, caught between fugitivity and perpetuity.
To this end, Toronto-based Hong Kong composer Aaron Chung – whose work is consistently drawn from the emotional weight of Hongkongers’ struggles – reimagines the music for the fountain’s phantom, with the trilogy piece performed live by saxophonist Alvin Wong.
Interlacing, the filmic and musical works emanate a poetic flow of visuals, words, sounds, and melodies.
Featured films A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella | 2024 | Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee
A video-poem that moves through the paradoxes of landscape and landmark, sight and site, origin and belonging, public and private memory, and past and present. The work traces circulating and shifting symbols embedded within socio-political transition, bilingual cultural identity, and coastal peripheries. Through close inspection under the microscope, the artist revisits colonial-era postcards, tracing their repetitions and transformations. The poem gathers, dilutes, and reconstructs these symbols like a fountain.
Everything I Know Or Thought I Knew | 2023 | Christie Lau
A film reflecting on the colonial history of Hong Kong and the artist's upbringing in post-colonial Hong Kong through the exploration of parks and fountains in Hong Kong and London. Combining material from their family archive, public archives, and present-day footage, the film traverses between past and present to arrive at some understanding, even if indefinite, of home, belonging, and displacement.
Rainbow Hunting | 2024 | Christie Lau
A diaristic reflection upon images captured by the artist during their brief visit to Hong Kong in 2024. A series of quiet observations unfold: crystal monuments, construction site hoardings, an instruction to capture a rainbow, and an ambivalence towards a place once familiar.
The Reimagined Fountain | 2026 | Jess Lau Ching-wa
(re-edited from the 2024 version)
The artist returns to the location where the family photo was taken twenty-eight years ago, and re-shoots the now different fountain scene. The video begins with this fountain photo, and the artist gradually wipes away the ink on the surface of the photo until the image completely disappears. Meanwhile, the accompanying text explores the contemplation between presence and absence, reality and memory, material and immaterial.
Saxophone performancePhantom of the Fountain | 2026 | for alto saxophone and live electronics | Aaron Chung
Conceived as a trilogy— Being, Deconstructing, Reconstructing, the piece draws from experiences of displacement and memory, embodying the tension between expectation and reality through persistence amid dissonance, the unsettling amid settling, a soundscape at once heavy and delicate. The piece was commissioned specifically for the programme.
Alvin Wong performing Phantom of the Fountain (2026) written by Aaron Chung at Theatreship. Photo by @escdotdot.
Press‘The Tides of Nostalgic Tunes’ | Vasita Jirathiyut (Pleng) | 15 July 2026
Pleng is a curator, producer, and writer based between London and Bangkok.
“I’d like to believe that nostalgia can also be a form of protection. Rather than trapping us in the past, it bonds communities together and strengthens solidarity. To me, that is what this programme offered: not simply memories of a place left behind, but a shared way of carrying it forward.”
Printed in an edition of 24 copies in London, 2026.
Accompanying the eponymous programme of short film screening and live saxophone performanc, Phantom of the Fountain brings together an opening text by curator Stephanie Chung, poem A Palm, A Fountain, An Umbrella by Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, essay〈噴泉與坑洞〉by Jess Lau Ching-wa, and stills from the four films featured in the show.