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Homegrown designer Joan Leung is the awardee of this year’s New Light II exhibition – creative series by young photographers. Unveiling the world of desires behind the city’s imprinted messaging, Leung’s Spoken Desires Photo Exhibition organised by Lumenvisum will be showcased at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCAC) starting from 4 June 2011.

Adventuring in the city, Joan loves to wander through the streetscape. She always sees messages marked somewhere somehow. Out of curiosity, she ponders and reads these scripts embedded in the public spaces. To her, the authors of these writings bare their desires openly. These expressions are impulsive and seemingly destructive, yet at the same time primitive, outspoken, pristine, brave, carefree and romantic. She appreciates these buoyant urban markings and transforms the hidden sentiment into memorable photographic creations of her very own.

“New Light exhibition scheme” set out to be a platform for nurturing young local photographers as well as introducing new talents to the scene. Each year, a potential artist is selected through open call and is provided with full support in debuting their solo exhibition in Lumenvisum’s gallery space. This year, Lumenvisum is honored to present “In & Out”, the first solo exhibition by Nicole Pun.

This exhibition showcases a series of hand photographs from American, Taiwan and Hong Kong lesbians. Tracing the local LGBT history and colonial past, the artist has spent years photographing hands from different age groups and different ethnicities. This series of 4 photographs mainly explores the body movement and the imagination of sexual intimacy. Our hands are a frequently and intensively utilized machine of our body. For lesbians, their hands have deeper and more personal meanings. Therefore, the artist invited individual participants to perform in front of her lens how they touched their partners, thereby performing the private. This series of work is not only their portraits, but also projections of their desire.

This conceptual work mixes with staged and documentary photography. The artist exposes the hidden secret through photography, blurring the line between public and private. It challenges the narrative of traditional documentary photography. “In & Out” received 2016 “WMA Masters: Special Mention”. It was featured in the French photography magazine Fisheye.

“Breaking free from perspective, layers of images show frames within frames. Each picture steps from one space to another, flows from landscape to image, advances to moving image, pushes further into painting, and finally lands on the pure spatiality. The exhibition is not only about the practice of viewing layered images progressively, but also an exercise to re-evaluate how time moves in a video.”