In the confines of a starkly lit room, a woman holds her shirt up to expose her bare back to the camera. She is bone-weary, hollow-cheeked, almost skeletal. When the photographer and documentary filmmaker Chan Hau Chun first took this grainy black-and-white image she didn’t realize that one day she would be exposing her mother’s emaciated body to the public. And when that moment arrived, she was overcome by dread. The photograph appears in her award-winning documentary 32+4 (2015), a raw portrayal of intergenerational family trauma that she completed during her final year at Hong Kong’s City University. She started making a record of her family life after her parents’ divorce, several years earlier, but never dared show anyone until she was “forced, at last,” as James Baldwin once wrote, “to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

Chan was born in China in the late 1980s, a time in which the one-child policy was strictly enforced, and like so many other children of her generation, having an older sibling meant that she had to be forsaken. She was initially sent to live with extended family members, most of whom she didn’t know, and grew up in multiple cities around Guangdong Province, attending different schools on a yearly basis. Her mother and older sister would visit on special occasions, but with each fleeting encounter Chan’s sense of abandonment only deepened, until, at the age of 12, she was finally able to reunite with her family when her father secured permits for them to relocate to Hong Kong. Chan’s father, who was mostly absent when she was a child, grew up during China’s Great Famine (1959–61), which killed an estimated 30 million people. His own father had died when he was three years old, and at the age of eight he was himself given up for adoption. In 1979, he immigrated to Hong Kong illegally, risking his life by swimming across the border from Shenzhen. After obtaining residence through the Touch Base Policy and picking up work as a laborer, he revisited his hometown on the mainland where he was introduced to Chan’s mother by a local villager. She was 20 years younger than him, and he offered her a bribe of a few hundred dollars. She accepted, and in 1985 they 
were married.

But perhaps the marriage was doomed from the start. “The whole thing just turned dark” is how her father puts it in 32+4, while in that same film Chan’s mother simply refuses to speak about the past. Over the years there were instances of domestic violence; Chan’s mother suffered from an anxiety disorder and her health deteriorated drastically. Around the time her parents finally separated, a few years after relocating to Hong Kong, Chan developed an affinity for photography which arose as a direct response to her upbringing. She was searching for something that she could depend on, something that provided stability, and it was through this medium that she could counter her self-described childhood of “flux and disappearance” by creating something that would last. In 2012 Chan was awarded the Daido Moriyama’s Favorite Award at the Hong Kong International Photography Festival (HKIPF), and she subsequently participated in a HKIPF group exhibition, “300 Families,” with her series Under the Bridge (2013), which recalls Gillian Wearing’s Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992–93). Under the Bridge marked Chan’s first encounter with a group of street sleepers in one of Hong Kong’s densest districts, Sham Shui Po.

I first met Chan at the studio she shares with three other filmmakers in a neighborhood a few blocks south of Boundary Street, not far from where her father first “touched base” in 1979, and near a park in which some of the “characters” from her films often linger. Chan is small, like the celebrated French filmmaker Agnes Varda, who once remarked, “I am small, I was always small, but only physically.” Chan also possesses a melancholy voice, but speaks with great self-assurance and is wholly unassuming. She tells me that despite the rent on the studio being reasonable, she still has to find ways of making ends meet and supplement the costs for her lengthy film projects whenever funding runs dry. To this end, she works 
as a cashier at a homeware store.

Over the past five years, Chan has been documenting the lives of various residents living in the partitioned rooms of an old tenement building in Sham Shui Po. 
Toward the end of 2018, a man she knew from the park brought her to a rather ordinary looking building: “We visited the room he resided in, or, more accurately, rented. There was a single bed, cluttered with all sorts of belongings and whatnot, and no window, no wind. Not even a breeze. He could have upgraded to a room with a window for a few hundred bucks more, but he had no desire for the view it might offer. He slept in the park anyway.” After her first visit, Chan started frequenting the place more often, attempting to familiarize herself with each floor and its inhabitants, before finally moving into a room of her own in 2019. There are ten to 12 tenants on each floor, all of whom share a bathroom and kitchen; each unit (measuring roughly five square meters) is neatly divided by a wall. Over time, Chan became more closely acquainted with a select few who, “despite the terrible living conditions, weren’t willing to give up on the joys of life and still fought for the tiniest freedoms to make their situation better.” And equipped with a small camera, directional microphone, and tripod, she began filming the lives of the characters she was most drawn to within the confines of their tiny homes.

“Silent Sojourns,” Chan’s first solo Hong Kong exhibition at WMA Space in 2024, sought to reimagine the partitioned rooms and the lives contained within them, in what the exhibition’s curator, Chloe Chow, deemed, “a sterile third space, devoid of individuality and time.” The resulting film, A Room of Many Rooms (2019–24), a single-channel video, was projected in a room of its own, blocked off by yakisugi (charred wood) panels, and positioned at the end of a long, narrow corridor. Upon entering, the liver-spotted face of a woman in her 80s with missing teeth and beguiling eyes peers out from the screen. Her image appears briefly before that of a middle-aged man, who sits on the edge of a bed swaying back and forth, in a room whose walls are fully adorned with brightly colored pictures. Then, another man in his 60s looks at himself in the mirror of a shared bathroom, whose walls are emblazoned with slogans such as: “Does it kill you to flush the toilet?” The characters in A Room of Many Rooms can often be seen watching television or smoking, and they frequently speak to Chan, whose presence is always felt behind the camera: “Have a cigarette,” one man says to her. “It isn’t cheap to buy cigarettes these days . . . I’ve got no money I shouldn’t really be smoking [laughing] . . . But I have so much time. Nothing to do, like a fool. 
It’s 5pm again.”

Moments like these, filled with an unintentionally Beckettian sense of the absurd, are what makes A Room of Many Rooms so multifaceted. And Chan avoids what the American advocate for post-realism in documentary, Jill Godmilow, once described as “pornography of the real,” or the exploitation of “real life situations” to produce a “titillation of difference which middle class audiences seem to need and enjoy.” In fact, her weariness of satisfying a certain gaze led to multiple reconfigurations of the exhibition space during the installation process. In the end, she chose to be transparent about her apprehension and indecisiveness by attaching a three-page written exchange between her and Chow to one of the exhibition walls, writing notes such as, “perhaps what I want is that when we think about partitioned rooms, the first thing that comes to mind is not their modest size, but that the people in them are, first and foremost, human beings,” or “Sorry I may have spoken too much. But I want to attempt to communicate clearly,” and “I don’t want to invade their lives with 
a specific objective, but rather to envision the complexities of their existence.”

Chan doesn’t see herself as a social reformer in the same way that Jacob Riis 
did when he photographed the living conditions of the New York City slums in the 1880s. Her vision is arguably closer to that of James Agee’s, who poignantly wrote about the lives of tenant farmers during the Great Depression in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from 1941 (which included photographs by Walker Evans). Agee wrote that “a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do.” For Chan, “There are always aspects within us that are unimaginable and irreplaceable; the dark corners of people’s minds remain inaccessible and therefore impossible 
to document.”

But perhaps the melancholy that underpins much of Chan’s work reflects the darker corners of her own mind, her own sense of rootlessness. And it is through others that she has found a purpose, or a means, as the photographer Emmet Gowin once put it, “of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.”

Frances James is an independent filmmaker and writer in Hong Kong.