My Random Diary 0 (2023) is a sequel to My Random Diary (2020) and works as a companion piece that continues to explore the historical events of the late 1960s in Hong Kong. In this film, a toy music box of children’s songs replaces the suspenseful soundtrack of sparse piano in the prequel. This lends a gentle nostalgia to the work that’s at odds with the more disturbing and matter-of-fact news items that appear as subtitles throughout. Similarly, to the companion work, a rolling slide reel of black and white images range from cloudy skies, to architectures devoid of people, street scenes and close crops of specific artefacts and furniture. The voice in the prequel is replaced with text that adds events from the news cycles of the 1960s onwards. Some violent, some political, some just human interest.

By synthesizing and collecting these archival materials, images and stories, Leung combines quotidian events with parallel moments of political instability. My Random Diary 0 juxtaposes these unrelated moments from various news archives with the photos taken during the site visits of the covered stories some 50 years later. The artists research into the site determining the order and re-telling of the historical events. Collectively, alongside My Random Diary, and in the context of the wider photographic project, Date Series (2017-ongoing), this embroils the personal into the political, gives weight to the subjective experience of history and lends a human perspective to the otherwise flattened homogeneity of historical facts.