When Justin Wong left Hong Kong in 2021, in the wake of a national security law imposed by the Chinese government, he left suddenly, with just four days to prepare. He moved, he writes, “from the known into the unknown, where everything must be rebuilt from the beginning in unfamiliar environments.”
A ‘Carry-On’ of Tender Artwork Fills the New Chinese Culture Center
The exterior of 667 Grant Ave. in Chinatown, with Justin Wong's artwork in the windows of the Chinese Culture Center's new permanent location. (Samson Wong; Courtesy of Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco)
Five years into a new life in London, the sadness of that jarring exile remains visible in the restrained lines of his artwork, now on view in Carry-On at the Chinese Culture Center.
But there’s something else in there, too: a dogged determination to process this loss and his perceptual shift into the Hong Konger diaspora. In spare, surreal scenes, Wong tenderly renders the complexity of his new experiences and emotions.
Carry-On (understood as both a luggage size and the very British imperative) is a show about displacement in a venue that is itself newly “placed.” At the corner of Grant and Sacramento, the CCC is starting a new chapter in its own 60-year history, just a short journey from the organization’s Kearny Street location.
In the former home of Bargain Bazaar, a series of Wong’s drawings are blown up and affixed to the building’s street-level windows. “Life is difficult,” they each read, with a different difficulty listed in both English and Chinese. “Every time I fight myself, I end up being the one defeated,” says a panel where doppelgängers grapple in a tangle of limbs.
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On another window, a man with multicolored trash bags draped around his body screams skyward. “Everything is my fault,” the text explains. The baggage of self-recrimination is made visible — and dryly comical — in Wong’s clear lines. It’s hard not to agree with one or all of the sentiments expressed in these images. Life is difficult. And by rendering these thoughts in words and pictures, Wong gives all Chinatown passersby the opportunity to name their own feelings.
Inside, Wong’s small show occupies about half of the CCC’s ground-floor space with mini graphic novels, framed prints, and a slideshow of digital illustrations from his Daily Wish Series (2022–2024). The rest of the storefront is given up to a design shop filled with objects too enticing for this reporter to risk looking at for long.
Carry-On captures a feeling of simultaneously moving forward and remaining stuck. For nearly two decades, Wong was a political cartoonist with a daily Hong Kong newspaper column. He was a professor and a graphic novelist. In the U.K., he says, he searched for a new context: How do I introduce myself? Who am I now?
This is Wong’s first show in the United States, and it coincides with a visiting professorship at UC Berkeley, where he’s being hosted by the Folklore Program and teaching the graduate course “Laughter as Resistance: Humour, Art, and the Everyday Politics of Hong Kong.”
At the CCC, Wong’s window installations give way to darker, more wry threads of humor — where the line between laughter and tears is far more murky. Three books hanging from the exhibition’s opening wall — The Book of Sadness, The Book of Forgetfulness and The Book of Repentance — are melancholy, delicate objects. These collections of text and black-and-white drawings, intimate in scale and form, are meant for quiet contemplation, one viewer at a time.
The show’s 10 framed prints often feature a diasporic everyman wandering his way through an otherworldly city. In The New Monument, he faces a Christo-like wrapping around a Trafalgar Square statue: an impenetrably foreign marker of some other place’s history.
One of the most poignant aspects of the show comes right at its start. In Wong’s drawing Reading Room, a book rests on an empty lounger, beside a view of an alien landscape. What was once “this place” has become “that place.” Hong Kong, for Wong, is no longer “here,” but “there.”
It’s a reality that many of us will experience or have experienced, whether by choice or necessity. What Wong does so well is illustrate what curator Hoi Leung describes as “the emotional jet lag of freedom” — the impossibility of fully bridging the distance between one’s heart and mind.
‘Carry-On’ is on view at the Chinese Culture Center (667 Grant Ave., San Francisco) through June 29, 2026.
