Artist’s Choice

Artist's Choice: Hon Lai Chu A Reading of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Artist's Talk

Artist's Choice: Hon Lai Chu A Reading of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Artist's Talk

Artist’s Choice: Ho Sin Tung March Comes in Like a Lion Film Screening and Artist’s Talk

Artist’s Choice: Law Yuk Mui Screening of Excerpts from The Assassin and Artist’s Talk

Date & Time

27 Nov 2020 7pm-9pm

Location

JC Cube

Price

$50

General

Hong Kong novelist Hon Lai Chu has released two books in turn this year—a collection of short stories, Embroidery on the Skin, and a collection of essays, Darkness under the Sun—which steadfastly illuminate the necessity and possibilities of memories and the perception of pain. In this Artist’s Choice event*, we will invite Hon Lai Chu to share with us a novel which has been impactful to her: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The writer will read for us passages from the book and speak from there about cities, collapse, relationships, and writing.

“I sometimes wonder if I had not come across The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the library when I was 15 (I did not even know who Milan Kundera was back then), whose book would I reread during the slumps I have had time after time after that? When I had no idea how to carry on, which fictional scenes would come to mind? I have lost count of how many times I have re-read this book since I was 15—from Tomáš to Sabina, from a time of turmoil to one of the mundane, and from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic back then to Hong Kong today.” — Hon Lai Chu

*The event will be conducted in Cantonese, with simultaneous interpretation from Cantonese to English available.


Artist Bio

Hon Lai Chu is the author of the short story collections Darkness under the Sun and Homecoming, and novels such as Body Seam, Empty Face, Lost Caves, The Border of Centrifugation, Body-sewing, Grey Flower, Kite Family, The Water Pipe Forest, Silent Creature and Hard Copies. Her novel Kite Family was one of the 2008 “Books of the Year” according to The China Times in Taiwan; it was also selected as “Top 10 Chinese Novels World-wide” for the year 2008 and 2009 respectively, and won the New Writer’s Novella first prize from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, and her novel Grey Flower was a Honorable Mention in Third Annual Dream of the Red Mansion Literary Awards. Her accolades also include the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Artist of the Year, Hong Kong Book Prize, and Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature (Fiction)