![]() She collects his sweat droplets, gathers samples of his hair, and observes him through a peephole as he sits in an adjacent room, ingesting coagulant, effectively embalming himself. A sorrowful but loving montage unfolds after Wong reluctantly agrees. Lau eventually asks Wong to take their work to its logical and inevitable conclusion: by turning him into a specimen as well. ![]() ![]() While he lives as a human being, the inevitable trajectory towards death means that the fate of becoming an inanimate, dead object looms over his living days. Quietly, the duo fixates on indexing, boxing, vacuum-sealing, and bottling food scraps, soap, and photographs, until “radually, there were more specimens than objects left in the city.” The process of specimen-making-a meticulous process that suspends objects in a moment in time, a limbo state of stasis for study and archival purposes-surfaces a set of philosophical tensions for Lau. While the city’s bright lights and skyscrapers remain tall and gleaming, the Hong Kong that immediately surrounds Wong and Lau is vacant and crumbling. ![]() The duo carefully preserves broken household objects, lifting ceramic shards out of the debris with tweezers and collecting pieces of concrete in glass jars. ![]() The short film Season of the End opens with Wong Ching and Lau Ho-chi, a pair of protestors in Hong Kong, sifting through the remains of a fellow protestor’s bulldozed home. ![]()
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