Another day in Paradise

Another day in Paradise digs beneath the veneer of the contemporary English landscape exposing the persistent ideology of the Brexit era. A series of color photographs made in the counties of England, from 2017 to 2019. The mixture of memory, stereotype, politic and psychological landscape become my imagination of post-Brexit England. I am a British Chinese born, and raised in Hong Kong. The unique cultural character of Hong Kong under the influence of the post-colonialism, which incorporates Eastern and Western cultures, offers me a blurry position in viewing the British identity. After the Brexit referendum, I came to Britain and the issue of nationalism was rising. My intention is to rediscover the social landscape and the British identity in the contemporary era, more precisely the Brexit era, from the perspective of someone who sits in the middle neither outsider nor insider. From 2017 to 2019, I kept visiting different counties in England, mostly they voted to leave the EU in the Brexit referendum. I summarize many characteristics of British life to form the sense to the people. The voice of the British people is diverse and an inescapable shadow of distrust covers the land. To extend my context, I include the bygone element in the project to discuss the historical relations to nowadays. It interestingly has close linkage to the confusion or a contradiction in signifier-signified relations in ideological representation. The images presumed to be easily indexical in a particular period of time and they certainly are not belong to contemporary icon. As my background is in lack of deep understanding to the tradition and the history, the exploited elements are the disjunction between pre-existing ideology and my wishful thinking. This “interruption” to the contemporary ideology becomes my metaphor. The representation of post-colonial existence was rhetorically recreated through my images. And that evolved to the occidental discourse from an easterner.