For a city as iconic in the global imaginary as Hong Kong, there are surprisingly few broad histories of its art. Filling that gap is Oscar Ho Hing-kay\u2019s Hong Kong Art: A Curator\u2019s History (1987-2004). More curatorial memoir than conventional survey, the book focuses largely on the years around the UK\u2019s 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, though in introducing the earlier artists, movements and debates that shaped the city\u2019s visual culture, the book offers up one of the most accessible introductions to a history that is surprisingly little known.<\/p>\n
This curator\u2019s history gets going in earnest with Ho\u2019s return from graduate studies in California in the 1980s to a Hong Kong where contemporary artists \u201cremained a minority who existed on the fringes of the local art scene, their ideas and works often not appreciated or accepted by the city\u2019s mainstream art establishments\u201d. The book is at its most vivid when Ho\u2019s first-person account captures the frictions of this period: for instance, when the senior Modernist sculptor Van Lau declared works by Ho and Ricky Yeung Sau Churk\u2014filled with soil, twigs and asphalt\u2014not to be \u201csculpture\u201d at all (thankfully, the curator Michael Chen disagreed). Or when the artist Chan Ching Wah spray-painted her own painting black at an opening in protest at the selection criteria of the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition. Here was a scene struggling to accommodate artistic experimentation.<\/p>\n
Promoting new practices<\/p>\n
If these disputes revealed the limits of Hong Kong\u2019s art institutions, the 1987 exhibition Out of Context revealed what lay beyond them. One of the first exhibitions Ho discusses in detail, it brought together artists working in installation, performance and photography\u2014practices largely absent from the mainstream institutions. Among the most memorable works was a two-day performance by Ricky Yeung, who chained himself inside a bamboo cage, half-naked and covered in blood-red paint, crawling and howling in a reflection on both the monotony of office life and the anxieties surrounding Hong Kong\u2019s future. More important, however, was what the exhibition revealed about the scene itself. As Ho recalls, the title referred to artists \u201cdisplaced in a cultural climate that is often indifferent to their activities\u201d; even the art historian David Clarke reportedly remarked that he had no idea such a group of artists existed in the city.<\/p>\n
The bulk of Hong Kong Art: A Curator\u2019s History, however, focuses on the exhibitions Ho organised as the artistic director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre between 1988 and 2001, where he aimed to demonstrate that Hong Kong possessed a culture worth taking seriously. This may sound like an odd proposition today in a city with institutions such as M+, Tai Kwun, Asia Art Archive and Para Site, among others. Yet Hong Kong long occupied an uneasy, marginal position: looking simultaneously towards China and the West\u2014and slurred as a \u201ccultural desert\u201d\u2014while struggling to recognise its own cultural specificity. As the homegrown theorist Ackbar Abbas observed, colonial Hong Kong tended to regard culture as something that came from elsewhere. In such a context, exhibitions became one of the few places where a cultural narrative about Hong Kong itself could be assembled.<\/p>\n
Broadening boundaries<\/p>\n
At the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Ho set about broadening what counted as art\u2014pushing back against aesthetic standards shaped by seniority and master-disciple hierarchies\u2014and whose stories it could tell. His first exhibition, Living with Art (1988), dispensed with the jury system then prevalent in official institutions, allowing anyone to exhibit. Other examples included Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity, which treated design, popular culture and everyday visual life as worthy of serious attention, while Art in the Camps expanded that inquiry to Vietnamese refugees living in Hong Kong\u2019s detention camps.<\/p>\n
If many of Ho\u2019s exhibitions sought to broaden the boundaries of Hong Kong culture, the looming handover gave such questions a new urgency. The countdown to 1997\u2014and the anxieties intensified by the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989\u2014prompted artists and intellectuals alike to ask what Hong Kong was, and what it might become. Against this backdrop, Ho\u2019s most influential curatorial intervention dealt with the legend of Lo Ting, a half-human, half-fish creature said to inhabit the city\u2019s Lantau Island. Ho transformed the myth into a series of pseudo-historical exhibitions, combining archival materials, works by contemporary artists, and fabricated evidence that deliberately blurred fact and fiction. By appropriating the authority of the museum itself, the exhibition challenged who gets to define history and identity. In the process, Lo Ting became a powerful metaphor for Hong Kong: a place searching for its origins while confronting an uncertain future.<\/p>\n
Hong Kong Art: A Curator\u2019s History is necessarily partial. Readers may wish for more on, for example, the Oil Street Artist Village, or the controversies surrounding the West Kowloon Cultural District. Rather than a definitive history, it offers something more personal and, at times, more revealing: a poignant account of one curator\u2019s attempt to make sense of a place grappling with profound historical change\u2014and to ensure that a crucial chapter of its artistic life is not forgotten in this \u201ccity of disappearance\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Oscar Ho Hing-kay, Hong Kong Art: A Curator\u2019s History (1987\u20132004), Rizzoli, 288pp, 200 col. illust., $65 (hb), published 8 September<\/p>\n
\u2022 Daniel Szehin Ho is the executive editor of CONG, a journal of ideas, art and the urban imagination in Asia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a city as iconic in the global imaginary as Hong Kong, there are surprisingly few broad histories…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,165454,288,308,93,240,61,60,1650],"class_list":["post-610053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-asian-art","tag-books","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-hong-kong","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}