“The Sound of Leaves Departing From a Silent Tree” (落叶归根)

The story of love and loss is an age-old one. The Liu Dao artists found one such tragic tale, almost lost in the hazy dark alleyways of Old Shanghai 老上海 , and brought it back to life with new technology in an old mirror.

Gender dynamics in modern-day Shanghai is an intriguing issue. In a country still largely patriarchal and chauvinistic, where the ratio of men to women stands at 120 to 100, it is somewhat bemusing to see pint-sized lasses in fluffy pink caps and candy-coloured heels loudly berating and shoving their cowering partners on buses, the metro, street corners and in shops. A similar trend is echoed in the rise of the “New Concubine” – a particularly lethal breed of second (or third) wives who wield a bewildering amount of influence over their so-called benefactors. Sometimes, though, love does manage to slip between the cracks. The Sound of Leaves explores the bittersweet memories of a spurned mistress, her melancholy and vulnerability forever frozen into the antique wood framed mirror that she stared desolately into, alone and lost in a city that had already moved on beyond her failing reach.

Blurb credit: Loo Ching Ling

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