PROFILES

Kong Chun Hei

The Eidetic Image

By Sylvia Tsai

Every evening Kong Chun Hei listens to ghost stories on the radio—people call into the local station from late night to early morning to relate their macabre experiences. It’s a habit the young Hong Kong artist acquired during childhood, when his father would turn on the radio before going to bed. Reflecting on these tales, Kong muses, “There are things science cannot explain, but I believe it is mostly energy.” The only time he felt shaken by one of the stories was while working on one of the ink drawings that make up Dust and Scratches (No Blank) (2012), which were drawn against a wall to allow the grains and textures of a projected Super 8mm film to be traced. The concept was inspired by Chinese art-collective WAZA’s Post Space 1 (2009), which consists of outtakes from Chinese, Japanese and Soviet films of the 1950s and ’60s that are transferred into a digital format, leaving remnants of the original films’ textures still visible.