Hong Kong artist Eva Leung, who relocated to the UK in September last year, has produced a series of double-exposed analogue photographs that combine scenes from her home city and her new home to depict the complex identity of Hongkongers living abroad.

The project known as The Overlapping Memories of Hong Kong and the United Kingdom was part of Leung’s dissertation for her master’s degree in Creative and Cultural Industries Management at Northumbria University.

It features dozens of pictures shot on film by Leung in the UK and by her friends in Hong Kong. The 30-year-old told HKFP that she first asked the photographers in Hong Kong to use a roll of film to record their lives and their thoughts and impression of the city. The film rolls were later sent to Britain, where Leung would shoot on top of the existing images.

The Hong Kong artist said her personal favourite was an overlapped image of a lit candle in the foreground of a Newcastle scene, created by her and Yip Tsz-shing: “I thought it was a really powerful and impressive picture when I first saw it.”

Leung said the greatest obstacle in putting the project together was the logistics of sending parcels from Hong Kong to the UK, as postal services had been unstable owing to fewer flights amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

On top of the film swap project, Leung also made collages in collaboration with UK-based Hongkongers by placing photos, scraps of newspapers and magazines and even Hong Kong banknotes onto a blank canvas.

“Both [projects] used the concept of ‘overlapping’ in expressing the complexity of a person’s identity,” she said.

Another project is in the making. Leung said she and her friends are set to launch a community art project in the UK, which may make use of an unused space in the neighbourhood for an exhibition.

Visit Leung’s website for more photos from the analogue series and her other projects.