Peter Hong-Tsun Chan | "AFTER-IMAGES OF A GOLDEN HOUR"

Press release

Long Story Short NYC is pleased to present After-Images of a Golden Hour, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Toronto-based artist Peter Hong-Tsun Chan. On view from September 9 through November 1, 2026, at 52 Henry Street, the exhibition brings together thirteen works in oil on canvas, linen, and paper that draw from Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, before the territory’s 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule.

Chan traces this history through images that have stayed with him: a face caught in the light of a car window, a motorcycle moving through a green tunnel, cans of pineapple marked by an expiration date, and a television glowing in a dark room. Born in Hong Kong, Chan immigrated to Canada with his family in 1993. The films are part of both a shared cultural history and his memory of the Hong Kong he left as a child.

The smaller works unfold like edited film sequences, pairing tightly cropped moments or placing scenes inside cathode-ray televisions labeled “NEW WAVE.” In the diptychs, Chan brings together a bloodied face and a kiss in Bruised Blue, a girl behind an apartment gate and a kite in Youth on a String, and a covered dice cup and a stack of dice in The Broken Absolute. Rather than retelling their source films, the paintings isolate gestures, objects, and colors that carry the pressure of a scene: a tunnel is washed in fluorescent green, a kiss is rendered in cold blue, and separated faces appear against fields of pink and yellow. In The Static of Starting Over, a moment from Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together shows one man resting inside a car while the other is cropped from view, with the words “Let’s start over” glowing outside the window. Superclásico pulls farther back, reducing two soccer players to small figures crossing an open field. The visible television frames acknowledge that these memories were shaped by both the films and the screens through which they were encountered.

The exhibition then moves from cinematic fragments to still life. The Shelf-Life of Love gathers lychee, mahjong tiles, Calbee chips, Vitasoy, canned dace, a hot dog, a California postcard, and an image of Tony Leung embracing a Garfield toy. Chan borrows the crowded structure of Dutch vanitas painting but replaces luxury goods with inexpensive products from everyday Hong Kong life. An expiration date becomes a measure of how long a relationship, memory, or version of a city can last.

In The Final Frame of Play, a cardboard box sits in an empty field at dusk beside lemon tea, a pineapple bun, a newspaper, playing cards, white flowers, and a vintage telephone. A note lists the years 1991 through 2000, with 1993—the year Chan’s family left Hong Kong—circled. Inside, a television shows a pink-gloved hand lowering a toy airplane into an aquarium, an image from Chungking Express. The cardboard structure connects packing and migration with the precarious shelters and informal economies Chan remembers from Hong Kong.

Peter Hong-Tsun Chan (b. Hong Kong) lives and works in Toronto and received his BAA from Sheridan College Institute of Technology. His paintings bring together the object-filled compositions of Dutch still life and the saturated visual language of 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong cinema. Through domestic objects, working-class food and packaging, and film imagery, he considers how migration and memory shape a person’s connection to home. Recent exhibitions include Outsiders Everywhere at Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing (2025); Ephemeral States at River Gallery, Taipei (2025); Teach Me How to Fish at Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong (2024); Crescent Heights at Harper’s, Los Angeles (2024); and the solo exhibition Opening Sequence at Long Story Short, Los Angeles (2023). His work has been featured in Vogue Taiwan, ArtMaze Mag, BOOOOOOOM, Tatler, China Daily, Ming Pao Daily, and The Globe and Mail.