Silent Sojourns /WMA Space / Hong Kong /Apr 19 – Jun 30, 2024 /John Batten / Hong Kong documentary filmmaker and artist Chan Hau Chun’s Silent Sojourns is the second project commissioned under WMA’s 2023/24 theme of “Home”. Chan has reconstructed-as-installation a Hong Kong residential unit divided into separate, black-panelled rooms inside WMA Space, its gallery in a nondescript office building. In these small-roomed exhibition spaces, Chan attempts to recreate the interior atmosphere of what she describes as an “ordinary-looking (residential) building” housing many subdivided flats in an undisclosed location in Hong Kong, possibly Sham Shui Po, where many such flats are located. Chan initially visited “a homeless acquaintance” in this building in late 2018. Over the following five years, she visited regularly and lived in the building, meeting residents from different floors. She began filming, including talking to residents, in 2019. In an excellent, zine-like booklet, containing photography, drawings, one- or two-line aphorisms, a formal explanatory essay and four pieces of poetry, Chan outlines her own observations, emotions and the reflections of residents. This …