From the native flora and fauna incorporated in his installations to his attentive study of the systems that support life in his works, the visual language of Trevor Yeung’s distinctive oeuvre is synonymous with Hong Kong. While the artist has exhibited internationally, Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice, the Hong Kong collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, is his largest presentation to date. Without the physical context of Hong Kong, Yeung‘s exhibition in Venice takes on new meaning for the international audience.

It would be hard to deny that Yeung’s works draw from the communicative memory of life in Hong Kong. Communicative memory^[1] refers to the informal traditions and everyday communications linking the present and recent past that exist outside of the formal and historical. Among the many examples of Hong Kong’s communicative memory are a warm glass bottle of Vitasoy in the winter; the often stern service at a cha chaan teng; and the slow crescendo of the ‘ding ding’ as the tram arrives. Yeung’s work, whether consciously or not, draws from this rich archive, imbuing it with his own lived experiences.

Upon entering the exhibition, one encounters Pond of Never Enough (2024), a fountain-like installation of stacked fish tanks with canal water flowing down into an empty fish-breeding pool. While this work was inspired by the artist’s memories of his father’s seafood restaurant, the rectangular glass tanks will be familiar to most Hong Kongers as they are ubiquitous in the place with one of the world’s highest seafood consumption per capita. Further inside the exhibition space, Gate of Instant Love (2024), with its s-shaped hooks and bags of water meant to hold fish, is reminiscent of pet stores in Prince Edward—specifically the part of Tung Choi Street that is informally known as ‘Goldfish Street’. Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) (2024), an immersive installation with shelves of aquariums with meticulously crafted biomes lit with tubes of pink light, is another reference to the pet shops typical of the 1990s. Additionally, the various electrical adapter bases of Night Mushroom Colon (Hong Kong in Venice) (2024), are a familiar sight to most Hong Kongers. With a land area of only 1,104 square kilometres, Hong Kong is small; leaving its territorial confines typically requires a collection of travel adapters as even its closest neighbour, Mainland China, uses an electrical plug type different from Hong Kong.

For many Hong Kongers, the imagery from Yeung’s works—restaurant fish tanks, Goldfish Street, international adapters—will evoke nostalgic memories of everyday life in the peninsular city. These sights are instantly recognisable to Hong Kongers as the informal, vernacular visual language that often goes unnoticed until it disappears or reappears outside of a familiar context. Would the works of Courtyard evoke the same sentiments in audiences without lived experiences in Hong Kong? Outside of the Hong Kong context, what would the exhibition look like? Would it look like a shop sold out of its main product?

Outside of Hong Kong, the glaringly vacant fish tanks, void of any form of life speak of a collective sense of loss reminiscent of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Although the pandemic seems like something strictly in the past, this collective years-long experience undeniably is a part of the global communicative memory. For example, the fish tanks may remind an international audience of the empty grocery stores during the peak of the pandemic. For others, it may recall the social isolation and distancing that was prevalent worldwide. Ultimately, the austerity and the palpable sense of something missing within the context of an artificial, human-made setting transcends the communicative memory of a specific locale and taps into the universal visual language of our times.