When I made this work, many people in my hometown were facing exactly that question—whether to uproot their lives, leave behind everything familiar, and migrate under the weight of a changing political reality. Families divided, futures uncertain. It is a decision that cannot be unmade, and one that countless families across the world have faced and continue to face, carrying with them the struggles, the fear and the grief of that impossible choice.

Neon has always held a particular meaning for me as a medium. For many people it conjures the Hong Kong of the 1970s and 1980s, a city alive with light and noise and possibility. Those signs are fading now, as so many things and people from that place quietly disappear. A warm white glow against a wall feels, in that context, like both a question and a farewell.

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Coffee or Tea? was first created for Coffee & SerendipiTea, Bankstown Arts Centre, 2024, and subsequently shown alongside Yuenyeung 43 in Fading Glow, Blank Gallery, Sydney, 2025.

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