Cheng Yuk Man, also known as Toast, graduated from the School of Creative Media at City University. She is primarily interested in photography as a way of playing with time and space and the idea of transforming a 3D space into a 2D image. Her powerful work for this exhibition entitled “Peace, Imperfect Peace” was triggered by the events that occurred on 15 June 2019 during the Anti- Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB). On that day she witnessed the death of a young man who was hanging a banner and fell to his death from an elevated podium in Pacific Place. Toast explains that it was the first day she brokedown crying for a total stranger. “In the days since the Anti-ELAB movement, I could hardly escape from the agony and sense of guilt, rage, fear and melancholy of losing something or somebody eternally and irreversibly. I found that it is strange that I did not even cry on the funeral of relatives, who I knew in my life and whose faces I can remember clearly.”
The months that ensued, Toast began to contemplate death and visited Sai Wan War Cemetery frequently and was touched by the many nameless tombstones of soldiers. Her work is a very large book, made to resemble a tombstone filled with the dates and locations of those who passed away during the last year since 15 June 2019. On the side are the words “LEST WE FORGET.” Photos of the familiar Hong Kong pavement patterns are reminders and memorials of these locations. Visiting the place of passing of each individual is performative where she dedicated herself into the role to open her understanding to the passed one, to reconfirm, or salvage, once more, their existence. Her art has many levels of metaphors and memorialises those that have passed within this year.