Fion C. Y. Hung is a Hong Kong visual artist, researcher, and art educator. Working with staged photography and photo collage, her practice explores family, the body, gender, and the social boundaries between what is considered “normal” and “abnormal.”
At the center of The Unclean Project / 不潔工程 is the pigeon, an everyday presence in the streets of Hong Kong. Once valued as food and messengers, while white doves were celebrated as symbols of peace, urban pigeons are now often associated with dirt and disease. Hung connects this changing perception of pigeons with the ways societies have historically classified and excluded those seen as “other.”
The project also draws on the artist’s own family history. In 2016, members of Hung’s paternal family were diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, a hereditary disorder. Although Hung herself tested negative, she continued to feel uncertain after recognizing possible symptoms in her own body. She also focuses on the derogatory term “pigeon man,” sometimes used in reference to people with Marfan syndrome because of the shape of the chest. By bringing the pigeon’s body into dialogue with her own, Hung reflects on the history of physiognomy and eugenics, which classified bodies outside an assumed norm as abnormal or unfit.
Combining photography, family trees, bodily measurements, medical imagery, and fiction, the book connects prejudice against pigeons with the artist’s own anxiety surrounding heredity and bodily difference, asking how certain bodies and beings come to be regarded as “unclean” or “abnormal.”
The Unclean Project / 不潔工程
Fion C. Y. Hung / 洪澄欣
190 × 284 × 25 mm
