The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety is a series of traditional Chinese folk tales that illustrate acts of extreme loyalty performed by children for their parents. The Hong Kong artist Fion Hung Ching-Yan has used those stories – which her father used to tell her at bedtime – as the visual stimuli for her series of therapeutic pictures, The Skeletons in the Closet. Think Eminem meets Confucius.
This image, now on show in Brighton, is based on the ancient story of the child who visits a family friend in a distant province and is given a mandarin orange. The family friend observes the child stealing two more oranges and hiding them in his sleeve. The host’s anger at the theft turns to praise, however, when he discovers that the child has taken the fruit not for himself but for his mother at home. Hung, it seems, is not wholly convinced by the implied guilt trip of that parable – the moral of her updated story is that there would never be enough oranges to satisfy the demands of her parents; she needs one or two for herself.
The series was prompted by the death of Hung’s grandmother in 2016, which exposed family secrets in conflicts over inheritance. The trauma of those arguments prompted her to pick up a camera and find a language for her stress. Speaking of the continuing project, she says: “I perform different bodily gestures and seemingly inappropriate acts to push against the institution of the ideal Chinese family.” In another picture, which illustrates the jolly story of a boy who willingly sleeps with his shirt off, offering his skin to mosquitoes so his parents don’t get bitten, her kitchen floor is filled with tumblers of blood-like liquid. Once again, however, a single, subversive artist’s hand is present to remove the only glass of water.
• Stealing Oranges to Take Home for His Mother is at the In Between gallery at Fabrica, Brighton, until 31 August
