When the Earth Remembers,
video sculptural installation, 2025
In the video sculptural installation When the Earth Remembers, Chloë Cheuk reimagines a traditional jade pendant passed down through generations into a portal transcending time. Embraced by the sleek elegance of swirling stainless steel forms, the piece symbolises infinity and invites viewers to journey from the past into the future. Drawing inspiration from the textures of jade artefacts of the Palace Museum, the artist breathes life into static images, highlighting the geological and historical significance embedded in the jade. Each artefact serves as a testament to human history, intertwining the legacy of jade with contemporary resonance. The work invites viewers to perceive these antiques anew—not as static relics, but as vibrant narratives that whisper memories and reverberate with the footsteps of those who came before, capturing the heartbeat of history in every curve and texture.
Commissioned by Hong Kong Palace Museum / Producer: YUCOLAB / Digital Advise: Maxime Perreault and Camelia Layach
…Until I am found,
stainless steel, glass, concrete, 2019
This unique viewfinder made of clear globes allows one to pan the city through transforming perspectives. By moving the smallest globular lens nearer to and further away from the largest frontal globe, the reflected cityscape would be altered from an upright but blurry image to an inverted yet clear view. Pacing between clarity and haze, the familiar and the strange, the lines between reality and illusion are blurred, and the physical and virtual world intertwine. This installation is a versatile metaphor for our constant search for direction and belonging, until an external voice resonates with us.
Commissioned by Asia Society Hong Kong Center / Fabricator: Jacky Chu
Waiting For Another Round
four-channel loop video, 6 min, 2014
The work documents the aftermath of Hong Kong’s 2014 Occupy Movement: over 20 days, Cheuk walked and filmed from various bus stops after protest sites were cleared, observing how wheels—those of buses, cars, and other vehicles—gradually erased traces of the occupation. Cheuk uses the wheel as both motif and metaphor: it becomes a symbol of relentless urban forces, but also of temporal continuity and disappearance. Sites once occupied merge, dissolve, reappear, and are reclaimed by vehicular movement.
Through this, Waiting For Another Round offers a meditation on memory, loss, and the cycle of public dissent: the ordinary routine of streets and transport continuing even in the shadow of unrest, speaking to both resilience and erasure.
Restless Reflection
mirror, metal, motor, 2018
Restless Reflection portrays a state of indulgence in self-reflection. Mirror, as a common object plays a metaphor of seeing ourselves, finding ourselves. When the mirror turns automatically at fast speed, the self-standing object loses its own function of reflecting the surrounding people or environment, trying to reflect its own body but in vain. The speed of the mirror that rotates no longer fit in the environment, leaving the solitude.
Please take your time.,
Hourglass, metal, grained tablets, prescripted label on plastic bag, 2017
Please take your time. is an hourglass that a powder form of Wellbutrin XL 300MG tablets that the artist took every day, an anti-depressants type of drugs, replaces the sand. “Please take your time.” was what the artist heard the most from her former partner during their separation. The sand in a fragile hourglass showing the passing time is replaced by the grained medicine the artist took every day to heal her mental illness. Time goes and comes but memory stays so does pain. The medicine is stored in the hourglass, so does the memory.
Long Gone,
3D printed resin, 2019
The work is a 3D-printed transparent telephone suspended from the ceiling. Cheuk intended it to evoke ideas of “unresolved matters, missing answers, and a lack of proper closure.” When communicating with people, and then no longer wanting to have further communications, we just ‘disappear’ by not answering the phone or texts — the transparency of the phone makes it appear as a ghost — it creates a mysterious feeling.
Commissioned by H Queen’s
Attributes
porcelain, metal, 2020
This porcelain helmet is a replica of a safety headgear—an emblem of protection and defiance. By reconstructing it in porcelain, a material both hard and fragile, the work transforms a symbol of resistance into a vessel of vulnerability. The piece was created from a place of witnessing — a quiet response to the movements of resistance in my home. It stands as a tribute to those who confront fear with courage, who insist on freedom even when the cost is high. Porcelain, with its delicate surface and enduring strength after fire, mirrors the human spirit under pressure: brittle, yet unyielding. Through this transformation of material, the work reflects on the tension between protection and exposure, strength and fragility — and the beauty that resides within the act of resistance itself.