Lau Kin Wah Polemical Position—Art’s Great Leap in Hong Kong and Its Denial of the Local

1. When I was invited to participate in this symposium, I thought of coming here to tell some sort of a history of post-handover Hong Kong, focusing in particular on the cultural identity of Hong Kongers intertwined with the development of contemporary art in Hong Kong—both subjects that are very dear to me. But following the spirit of my former residency project, Art HistoriCITY at Asia Art Archive (AAA), I thought of proposing to treat these subjects as a kind of art historical writing on Hong Kong and to include a personal perspective. History is constantly in the making in this city, but its fate tends to keep repeating itself, and that is why this is quite a pessimistic story to tell.

Art in Hong Kong has undoubtedly gained more exposure and attention in recent years, as it has gained an increasingly prominent position in the global art market. But as the art scene in Hong Kong becomes more “internationalized”—as if “internationalization” is something universal—a serious gap (even a hierarchy) has started to emerge between global art world players newly holding key positions and the local context, just when debates over “the local” and Hong Kong cultural identity are becoming more critical than ever owing to the crisis of “mainlandization.” This “great leap” in the development of art is losing touch with local identity, and has thus generated a denial of the local that I would like to address here. It seems that the art world in Hong Kong is finally catching up with the city’s capitalistic “collaborative colonization.”1

I will therefore attempt to outline a trajectory focusing on the issue of “the local” and to anchor it within an art historical perspective on exhibitions, together with various related propositions of art historical writing on Hong Kong. I hope my writing here will start addressing the politics of aesthetics behind all of these, especially in the coming era of the artistic boom represented by the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), M+, and Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as hinting at some radical thinking toward a future of decolonization.

Ever since Hong Kong was turned into a British colony in the nineteenth century, expatriates founded a cooperative relationship with the Chinese community as its way to govern. This collaborative foundation led Hong Kong to develop very early on its role as a port in introducing the West and its modernity to the East, and continues to do so even as the city experiences its many changes.

Vol. 13 No. 2 127 One interesting case is Matthew Turner who, in 1981, was hired from overseas by Hong Kong Polytechnic to teach modern design, and who curated two very important shows—Made in Hong Kong (1988) and Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity (1994)—that examined the material production of Hong Kong in relation to the formation of Hong Kong’s cultural identity, as well as the political economy behind it. The 1960s and 70s, when the economy started taking off, is often cited as the crucial period of formation of Hong Kong identity. Yet by the 1980s, this Hong Kong success story started to encounter uncertainty in anticipation of the 1997 handover to mainland China, and a new wave of discussions about Hong Kong identity began alongside the Sino-British talks about the handover (in which any position that might represent Hong Kong as the third party in the negotiations was denied). This was then followed by an even deeper crisis that ensued after the 1989 Tian’anmen Square massacre in Beijing.

In the inaugural issues of Art Asia Pacific, in 1993, two writings for the “Hong Kong Report” concurrently seized the occasion to discuss the issue of cultural identity within Hong Kong art. In “A Pact of Separate Peace,” Chang Tsong-Zung, of Hanart Gallery, characterized the art scene as “secretive” and the structure of Hong Kong’s cultural identity “incongruous” with “the sense of being in Hong Kong, of being buffeted and threatened by cultural- political forces from the West and from the north [China]. . . . ”2 Oscar Ho, of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, in his “In Search of an Identity (Hong Kong Report),” also felt that Hong Kong was experiencing “a ghostly existence between the East and West,” but he pinpointed the importance of having an “independent cultural identity” which was also closely tied to the hope of “political self-determination.”3 That is perhaps also the keyword behind the significant Hong Kong Cultural Series exhibitions that he curated at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from 1991 to 1998 and his attempt to advance the Hong Kong identity debate beneath the shadow of the 1997 handover.

2. Fears surrounding the 1997 handover were realized as the directly-elected Hong Kong Legislative Council was scrapped and replaced immediately, within hours, after the handover. It wasn’t long afterward, in 1999, that Beijing used its authority to override the Hong Kong Supreme Court decision over the Right of Abode—eligibility for citizenship to live in Hong Kong—by reinterpreting the Basic Law for the first time. However, through leading a populist strategy, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government stirred up the citizens’ fear of a great influx of new mainland immigrants, and the issue thus faced comparatively little public opposition. Oscar Ho wrote a piece titled “Hong Kong: A Curatorial Journey for an Identity” in Art Journal in 1998, lamenting this incident as the end of the former openness toward Hong Konger’s identity as the city ironically used to be an immigrant society itself.

Hong Kong art, however, seemed to fall into a twilight zone after its fifteen minutes of fame during the 1997 handover. David Clarke’s publication on Hong Kong art raised the question of decolonization, but theorist Ackbar

128 Vol. 13 No. 2 Abbas’s concept of disappearance—that as the 1997 handover approached, there was a phenomenon that many things that appeared in Hong Kong art were due, paradoxically, to the fact that those very things were disappearing—seemed to best identify the dominating paradigm, hinting at a process that was relatively more passive (nostalgic and fatalistic) and politically weak.4 The exhibition Magic at Street Level that Chang Tsong- Zung curated for the first Hong Kong exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2001could be seen as an extension of his characterization of art in Hong Kong mentioned above, and, fitting alongside Abbas’s paradigm, he tried to give Hong Kong a cool metropolitan character that stood out in distinction to the Taiwan pavilion and to the impression of mainland art for foreigners.

The title of the 2003 Para/Site exhibition in Beijing, Local Accent—12 Artists from Hong Kong, is another telling example.5 While the Chinese title played with the idea of being marginalized within the greater Chinese art world, the English title, Local Accent, suggested a metaphor of Hong Kong self- identity—one that signaled contemporaneity with Western and international art trends and is familiar with “international language” (if not really part of the big family) while retaining its own unique character. From a certain perspective, this wishful thinking of sharing an international status in the field of art—despite the fact that the concept of global art was still not popular in the West—was quite a match to the official rhetoric that constantly boasts about Hong Kong’s international status in world trade and finance.

However, when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government pushed hard to enact the National Security Law in 2003, Hong Kongers demonstrated their anger in a protest of five-hundred- thousand people who took to the streets on July 1 (the anniversary day of the Hong Kong handover) and eventually brought the enactment to a halt. Hong Kong thus finally entered a new phase after 2003, that of “Post- Post-'97,” as film critic Longtin first put it.6 Instead of further apathy, Hong Kong society was charged with a new political energy, leading it to be called the "city of demonstrations."

3. Before 1997, part of Hong Kong’s confidence in post-'97 “one country, two systems” was due to the fact that it understood its role as a valuable showcase of the People’s Republic of China, not only to Taiwan, but the rest of the world as well. Hong Kong has often been seen as an anomaly in colonial history, with the colony having overtaken its colonizer in economic success. Followers of “Hongkong-ology” even believed they could demonstrate and teach mainland China modernization using Hong Kong’s own example. Those in Cultural Studies are generally more skeptical. Reminding us of Rey Chow’s “in-between colonizers” description of the handover,7 scholar Law Wing Seng noted how the Communists actually preferred that Hong Kong retain its colonial governance model for its stability and easy governing.8

However, with all the Beijing interventions into local politics since the handover, the notion of “Hong Kong, China”—one country, two systems—

Vol. 13 No. 2 129 has become bankrupt. One might say no one trusts the HKSAR government any longer as a government serving the most local interests and the sense of local identity has drifted further than ever from identification with the “one country” (as it equates the dictatorial Chinese Communist).

However, the Hong Kong Story, also known as the story of “Lion Rock Spirit” (in which hard work leads to success), is still being utilized in various forms of HKSAR propaganda despite how all the social conditions favouring social mobility has changed, suggesting how outdated the generation of the ruling class is. Yet the exhibition Build the Hong Kong: RedWhiteBlue (2004) at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, guest curated by Anothermountainman (Stanley Wong), seems to have internalized it whole heartedly, producing in his works slogans such as “Hong Kong can-do!”

Rather than monopolizing the ubiquitous red-white-blue polysheet as representing a very Hong Kong spirit, participating artist Tsang Tak Ping’s free-standing portrait panels, One Voice (2004), lent instead the connotations of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the three colours to address the hostile attitude of Hong Kong residents over the right of abode issue, stating and stripping it bare of any aesthetic imagination. Matthew Turner, in his contribution to the publication redwhiteblue—here/there/ everywhere (self-published by the curator, also tried to direct us to read between the lines.9 Noteworthy in the same publication, critic Chin Wan ended his reprinted text, “An Alternative History of Red-White-and Blue,” with a note reminding us of the danger of Hong Kong’s becoming no more than “a blurred Chinese city.”10

Other public institutions like the Hong Kong Museum of Art fared no better, curating shows later on such as Chin-glish (2007) and Made in Hong Kong (2008). The former was reminiscent of the fusion of East/ West tongue-in-cheek word play, while works (by Hung Keung and Wong Chung-yu) with traditional Chinese elements (calligraphic words and scroll painting) were both updated with interactive media interfaces. The latter exhibition, despite having the same name as the title of Matthew Turner’s exhibition, focused on a few Hong Kong artists selected on a personal basis. In hindsight, this shift in the use of the “Made in Hong Kong” label, conceivably captures how the manufacturing industries have all moved north—what is left to invest in are those of the creative class. With official campaigns promoting Hong Kong as the “Asia World City” (or being the “Ny-lon-kong” on par with New York and London),11 the next big thing the HKSAR is preparing for from the top down is the “wicked” (in Matthew Turner’s words) West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD).12

4. As Hong Kong stepped into the post-post-’97 handover era, it gradually started a re-examination of the local and of decolonization. Other than being an outcome of the mainlandization that pervades trade and HKSAR governance, one other important source of these concerns are the programs of urban redevelopment (such as the Wanchai Lei Tung Street Project), which are not just gentrification at the expense of the existing population

130 Vol. 13 No. 2 and ways of living, they yield profits and CEO. bonuses.

The Save Star Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier movement (2006–07) started out as heritage preservation demonstrations against demolition and harbour reclamation that accommodate more roads and yet another shopping mall. But other than perhaps the first civil "direct action" to try to halt the demolition, through tracing local history such as the Star Ferry Pier as a site for the first public demonstrations in the 1960s, activists—among them the group Local Action—successfully revealed the backwardness of the new business-inclined development planning in contrast to the cultural democracy (with planning that caters to public spaces and facilities) that was intended to inform the design of the colonial waterfront complex. The activists thus transformed a heritage preservation request for retaining specific buildings that embodied collective memory and nostalgia into that of a knowledgeable social movement wrestling with HKSAR’s top-down development mentality.

If Re: Wanchai—Hong Kong International Artists’ Workshop (2005) could be seen as a kind of late wakeup call demanding that artists pay attention to the upheavals in many of the older communities around Hong Kong, the gradual institutionalization of the art scene pushed it in an opposite direction—away from the local. Para/Site, which opened in 1996, departed from its original artist-run space direction in 2005 by hiring Tobias Berger, the first of its line of in-house foreign curators. Tsang Tak Ping, one of the founders of Para/Site, who had previously used the theory of decolonization in the interpretation of his own works and who foresaw the community-based potential of the art space situated in an old residential district, thus later chose to leave Para/Site. One of the last works he showed with Para/Site was his work in the project Among-others (2007) where banners by artists were carried and displayed in the annual, since 2003, July first demonstration. Tsang Tak Ping’s banner carried the statement “Local is Home.”

Bumping into Tsang Tak Ping on one occasion contributed to the formulation of the title of my article in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, namely the “No Local is an Island.”13 I worked with him after that on two other occasions related to AAA. First, was the “Histori-CITY” project, triggered by the very first history of Hong Kong art written in Chinese that had just been published by a mainland scholar, Zhu Qi; next was the Handover/Talkover project in 2007 that marked the tenth anniversary of the handover with my installation Hell No! Hong-gang, which was presented in 1a space, as an artistic dialogue with Tsang Tak Ping’s former Hello! Hong Kong series that concerned local identity.

In the same year, I chose to write my contribution for an exhibition of Hong Kong artists at Shanghai MOCA and I focused solely on the Local Action group that stationed itself at Queen’s Pier; I tried to articulate, with them as a case study, art that is activism (of course certain parts were censored in the mainland China publication).14 My co-curated exhibition

Vol. 13 No. 2 131 Chie!, the following year, brought together various activists and activist groups, including Chow Sze Chung of In-Media (and Local Action), and Tsang Tak Ping’s photos as used in One Voice (2004) which also appeared in a new format, that of abode rights demonstration props that were then continuously used by the activist group Autonomous 8a (Social Movement Resource Centre).

At that point, art in Hong Kong was lagging behind the city’s progressive discussion about its localism, especially in comparison to the more in-depth discourses gathered in the first of the annual issue of Local Discourses, published in 2008. Included in this publication is a groundbreaking essay by Hui Yuk, “Another Kind of Local, Another Kind of Identification, Another Kind of Politics,” alongside Chow Sze Chung’s “The Birth of the Hong Kong Story,” and Law Wing Seng’s “Approaching the Subjectivity of Locality?”15

5. In 2009, a group mostly from the post-1980s generation sought its own way to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of June 4 with their P-at- riot cultural festival. Some were from the We-Are-Society group, in which Tsang Tak Ping was also involved, who performed on consecutive weekends at Star Ferry Pier before it was demolished. The P-at-riot project included many activities including a formal art exhibition, film screenings, a concert, and a few art actions. Among these events was a “Reading Group Picnic Session,” hosted by Chow Sze Chung with a number of guest speakers such as Law Wing Seng and Chin Wan. I highlight these two guests because their paths crossed there, but later they evolved very different stances on the advancement of local discourse. While these two guests were still united on some issues—from the Save Choi Yuen Village/Anti-High Speed Railway Front (a mainland network with the Hong Kong extension terminating at WKCD) to that of the movement against the hegemony of land developers (a movement out that arose out of people’s anger with the control a few corporations hold over almost every aspect of Hong Konger’s lives, starting with the high cost of housing)—ultimately it was the difference in strategies in confronting the Realpolitik under the continuous increase of threats of “mainlandization” that finally caused them to part their ways.

Law Wing Seng, a professor of Hong Kong Cultural Studies, upheld his leftist and humanistic views, publishing his book Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese,16 which brought forth critical self-reflection upon Hong Kongers’ identity formation. The post- 80s activists basically hold stances along this line, and the song, Someone Asks Me About Justice and Righteousness (2010), from the band Group 35 (with Chow Sze Chung as drummer), and with lyrics sung in Mandarin, addressed the overwhelming social control on the mainland that arrived with the Beijing Olympics in 2008. They tended to see the democratic movement in Hong Kong as being a counterpart to China.

On the other hand, Chin Wan, who was an arts and cultural policy researcher for the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Home Affairs Bureau before becoming an outspoken cultural commentator, deliberately

132 Vol. 13 No. 2 took a more populist position defending Hong Kong’s localism against “mainlandization.” By writing Theory of Hong Kong Polis Autonomy in 2011,17 he mobilized people to join in the Hong Kong Autonomy movement that controversially used the former colonial flag as its own code of arms. For them, the core values of Hong Kong, such as rule of law and freedom of speech, values that were previously installed by the colonial government and upheld by society, were falling one after the other in order for the HKSAR to please the mainland authorities. The paradox is, of course, that the autonomy of “one country, two systems” is ultimately only a wishful collaborative deal for a Hong Kong that hopes to retain its former status quo.

For the activists, the threats of violence from patriotic mainland visitors, as well as the abusive police force they experienced while protesting in Hong Kong in 2008 against the Beijing Olympics, might suggest a discouraging change of tide. Yet all the intensification of tensions between Hong Kong and the mainland that spurred an emphasis on localism and a kind of separatism could perhaps be traced back to The Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) and the Individual Visit Scheme (allowing a certain portion of mainlanders to visit Hong Kong) that were pronounced in 2003 and that affected the livelihoods of common people.

6. 2003 was a watershed, and art in Hong Kong gradually started picking up some political undertones with works by Tozer Pak followed by those of Luke Ching Chin Wai, who appeared regularly for some years in Sunday Mingpao, a mainstream newspaper responding to social incidents. One could say art in Hong Kong moved away from its previously secretive paradigm. Yet, if David Clarke’s Hong Kong Art—Culture and Decolonization (2001) appeared in hindsight a bit too early, retaining a pre- ‘97 (or post-‘97 yet pre-‘03) perspective and hence unable to shed much real light on, or predict, the post-post-‘97 scenario, Frank Vigneron’s I Like Hong Kong—Art and Deterritorization (2010),18 which proposes a progressive attitude in the handling of identity of Hong Kong artists in our era of globalization, nevertheless came too late, at a time when the art world had been wholly transformed by global, free-flowing capital that summoned the art fair craze. The first ArtHK art fair was sponsored by Lehman brothers in 2008, with the fair renamed Art Basel Hong Kong, in 2013. One could perhaps say that this world wide shift in the art scene towards the market also happened in Hong Kong and owed much to the huge investment in the West Kowloon Cultural District, which is itself the government’s move to try branding Hong Kong as another so-called “creative city.”

I remember around 2004 I was still musing over the possibilities about a more idealistic “glocal” constellation in a written piece I contributed to Asia Art Archive’s online newsletter dIAAAlogue, titled “Layers (or the pardon of a narrow glocal vision)” after participating in the Venice Biennale Hong Kong pavilion together with Tsang Tak Ping.19 But as Hong Kong started on the development of the West Kowloon Cultural District and M+ project, pumped by auctions and the landing of Art Basel, it bid farewell to the “third world in the art world” as Hong Kong artist Luke Ching Chin Wai

Vol. 13 No. 2 133 put it when someone actually defended the Hong Kong Museum of Art holding a Louis Vuitton show in 2009, saying that we do need Vuitton to bring to our “starved audiences” works by Gilbert and George or Takashi Murakami. Yet, now, with a great leap from a third world art scene to being the world’s third-largest art market, local art suddenly has a fierce front to face: the one-sided rhetoric of internationalization, driven by a global market agenda.

Upon being asked the rather unfortunate question “Does Para/Site prefer to be more local or more international?” Para/Site curator Alvaro Rodriguez Fominanya replied, “I think more international.”20 Truly unfortunate, however, is how the hired from overseas M+ Executive Director Lars Nittve chose to mislead people about why many Hong Kong residents were against some of the moves of M+. One of the controversies, for example, was that M+ took over the curating of the Hong Kong pavilion at the Venice Biennale, thus dispensing with the original open call competition for curatorial proposals. Towards the issue of “the local,” he irresponsibly mixed up (instead of sorting out intelligibly) the camps in the contestation of the local discourse, smearing even Hong Kong activists critical of mainland politics as having formed “an unholy alliance” with conservative players, of being “less tolerant to people from ‘outside,’ be they mainland Chinese, Westerners, or domestic helpers from Southeast Asia,” thus putting Hong Kong's global open mindedness at risk.21

As the homegrown was discredited as infantile and unprofessional, the situation seems to have reversed itself in the extreme with artists who have a foreign accent being sought after and replacing artists who have a local accent as a mark of self-identification. It is perhaps true that having lived abroad and being more exposed to international art, these are the artists who speak more fluently the same language as the global curators, and this might make them more amenable to work with. But is that all that being international is about?

In a recent article, “Hong Kong Locality and Local Discourse,” scholar Ma Kwok Ming tackled the “the temptation of the local” (Ackbar Abbas) and discussed the controversial naming of Xiqu Centre, the first of the cultural venues at WKCD, tracing the problem right back to not just the use of romanize d–Mandarin, but the need of an English translation and the real cultural political agenda behind WKCD. 22

It is always easy to speak of the ideal, as was evident In Search of Cultural Policy ’93 (1994), in which three strategic “isms”: Internationalism (NOT Western imperialism), Regionalism (NOT provincialism), Localism (NOT oriental sectarianism) were enlisted.23 Yet who is the one, or what is the mechanism, for keeping cultural things in balance as suggested? Or what if equality is not the guiding principle? This is where contemporary art should finally recognize the significance of the politics of aesthetics and act accordingly. Globalism might be good at times for gaining solidarity, but the local battle still must be fought locally. At least no one should be naive enough

134 Vol. 13 No. 2 to believe the new political and cultural hegemonic colonizer could sincerely help advance the local discourse on decolonization, from the top down.

7. What has really gone wrong with the West Kowloon Cultural District is that it did not begin as a genuine attempt to organically develop the art scene in Hong Kong from within. To attain its ambitious goal of being a benchmark within the world’s high-profile museums, M+, for example, had to hire global players, the experienced, the opportunists. Building something “world-class” simply is building something that will draw people’s attention and money worldwide, and bring economic benefits (perhaps even more direct in the form of property market rather than cultural tourism or the local creative industries). With the giant sum of capital investment, our artists might gain some visibility by being alongside other international stars. At the same time, the public is offered spectacles to consume. But why are these resources and opportunities not being invested in developing all aspects of the cultural rights of Hong Kong citizens, from the bottom up?

The original sin of West Kowloon Cultural District is that the government decided at the very beginning to go ahead with its development decisions and blackmailed the local arts practitioners that it was a “this or nothing” situation. This was certainly not the proper attitude (not to mention that it was far from sincere) in the development of culture, and it exemplified an extension of the kind of wrong-headed governance and economic decision making that is overriding and altering the course of Hong Kong’s cultural development. And, worst of all, it demanded of our cultural practioners their compromised collaboration in a demoralizing way. It is this political wrong that, in my mind, is tainting every (even good-hearted) act that could help the WKCD project be realized. Given their lack of awareness of context, local social political sentiment, and strong commitment to Hong Kong, the global players who have been hired won’t ever think of themselves (accepting these offers as) in the wrong, but, instead, seize this as opportunities to make their big impact with the support of the HKSAR.

I must say, however, that I cast a different set of eyes (not without certain respect) on the Swire group when they made their bid to the WKCD planning competition, for their plan actually reminded the government that it should first review all the current wasteful existing facilities before considering to build new cultural infrastructure, and that they could be distributed around the whole harbour instead of focusing solely on the plot of land at West Kowloon. Due to the fact that Swire refused to consider building an artificial canopy (as the competition required but was abandoned at a later stage) in their proposal and humorously counter- proposed a real green forest canopy, they were the first to be kicked out of the competition. But if even a land developer like Swire could do something this sensible yet daring, I still don’t understand why the art community could not be united and together convince the government to return to a principled approach in developing the local arts ecology.

Vol. 13 No. 2 135 8. In the paper “Reclaiming Culture and Creativity from Industry and the UK Creative Economy: Towards New Configurations of the Artistic System” (2012) by Yuk Hui and Ashley Wong,24 the authors cracked open the myth of creative economy as an extension of speculative capitalism that profits a few star figures while most in the industry work as poorly paid, socially and economically insecure freelancers. As the rent level in Hong Kong is already infamously outrageous enough to draw people to form a movement to fight against the hegemony of land developers, note that Art Basel Hong Kong charges vendors a rental fee during the few days of the fair; a rent one gallerist revealed that is equivalent to ten months rent of his gallery located in Central Hong Kong.

The commercialization of art is not to be blamed as another original sin, at least not here. But when one acknowledges how M+ got to organize its shows—that of Mobile M+’s Yau Ma Tei (2012) and Inflation (2013)— to coincide with the fairs ArtHK and Art Basel Hong Kong, it becomes clear how no one can afford not to dance around the market these days, and the bigger the business, the heavier the reliance. By accepting Uli Sigg’s contemporary mainland Chinese art collection, a collection that is not much different from what is seen and sought after in the market, M+ has in fact abandoned its professional curatorial duty by promising to feature these works with a collectors’ wing upon its inaugural opening. To put it bluntly, Sigg’s collection landing at M+ suggests that within a Hong Kong context, internationalization is achieved via mainlandization, and internationalization and mainlandization are indeed homogenous commercialization. The world, including the art world, is chasing after China’s market and its abnormal wealth in furthering their own development.

Uli Sigg suggested that the placement of his collection with M+ will allow the so-called politically sensitive collection to stay in China, but this is simply a naive idea. It is too easy to show those seemingly political artworks in Hong Kong. Having them exhibited outside the mainland also will not contribute much to the scenario in China; many artists working within such a regime have turned such export into an outlet for self-censored mainland practice. Presenting Hong Kong as the only region of China that is free might actually generate an impression based on the whole of China, one that is devoid of distinguishing the differences between mainland China and Hong Kong, and eliminating completely the making of art politically within one’s own context. Such a situation also disregards the fact that in Hong Kong it is the Hong Konger’s freedom that is in reality shrinking due exactly to an oversimplified picture that focuses on the mainland and that marginalizes and neglects the local subjectivity of Hong Kong.

It is superficial for Hong Kong to make the political gesture of featuring Chinese artists whose work is sensitive in China, especially as Hong Kong civil society remains generally supportive of the mainland human rights movement. Even the Hong Kong art circle has mobilized itself to form the Art Citizen when Ai Weiwei was arrested, and since 2010 this group has

136 Vol. 13 No. 2 generated or participated in several public demonstrations. If it is political censorship that an institution is truly concerned with, and wants to show its solidarity, there are already a lot of such issues happening to Hong Kong artists right now to which they could respond.

Commercial sponsorship often comes with political strings attached, since many companies with business ties in mainland China could not afford to support the true freedom that contemporary art demands. The recent Rural and Urban Mutual Sustainability exhibition held at the Tuen Muen Plaza (shopping mall) was stillborn due to censorship coming from the officers representing the land developers owning the mall. What I saw in this case was that there were Hong Kong artists who still believed in this exhibition format, even if it was in a shopping mall, and who wanted to communicate with the public on crucial local issues but were also denied.

The local, being a pressing and sensitive issue, has simply too few institutional platforms that allow artists and curators to engage resourcefully, but, as crucial as it is, there is often no choice for people other than to move on to other options and other means.

9. Museums may like to safeguard history. Exhibitions, however, are one step closer to the site of artistic production. But the dilemma of the fusion between art and life can be pushed even further as the biopolitics of contemporary art demands. As we follow this trajectory, we find that the truly interesting arena of art is already shifting from museums and exhibitions to projects, actions, and festivals. If someone complains that cultural identity seems not to be an artistic concern in itself, I have no objection, for what I am after is the avant-garde energy, of politics and aesthetics, wherever it appears. If someone opts out of the art world, it is not a big deal, but if we consider it the other way around, maybe it is not that they are stepping out of the art world, but that the art world is of too narrow a mind to accommodate them.

Following the various oppositional social movements in Hong Kong that targeted mainlandization alongside neoliberal economic development, capitalistic globalization, wrongheaded land use, tax revenue, as well as social security policy, a new kind of thinking about the question of the local seems to be emerging. Recently, in 2013, Matthew Turner revisited Hong Kong during a Polytechnic University Thinker Residency, and his talk on social innovation paid attention to something local that is quite peculiar, that of the farming movement in rural Yuen Long. Even Chin Wan is very fond of his upbringing in the environment and he wrote feverishly about it in his publications. And it is indeed this seemingly out of place idea of farming in Hong Kong that is the last item I would like to bring up here, for the people I have singled out, among them Tsang Tak Ping and Chow Sze Chung, now live in Yuen Long and devote much of their time on the farm named Sangwoodgoon (literally a place or museum [goon] of living [sangwood]).

Vol. 13 No. 2 137 After learning some organic farming skills during the days they visit, as well as helping to defend Chi Yuen Village from being demolished, they gradually gained a new understanding of rural life. They also recognize that activism has to find a way back into their own lives, fostering holistically one’s belief into one’s own reality. The title of a book edited by Yuk Hui (and in it is Chow Sze Chung’s contribution about Sangwoodgoon), You Must Change Your Life (2012),25 pronounced straightforwardly, that for the social changes that activism is after, the most concrete thing to do is to put it into practice in one’s own life. Farming, something previously unthinkable for many, unexpectedly now seems to reveal the existence of viable ways to lead a more autonomous life and is literally another turn to a “Made in Hong Kong” in the form of primary production.

Museums used to be about the formation, function, and dimensionality of cultural identity, but, as Boris Groys has repeatedly pointed out, what is collected is dead, and contemporary art is seeking to be alive. The consequence of the end of art history, of going outside of the museum, might be affecting not just museums, but even exhibitions, making them an obsolete form, a framework that obstructs art from being part of real life, transforming it from art to a participation in the history of something other than itself.26

This thought also brings to mind Yuk Hui’s idea in his essay contributed to the Local Discourses (2008) publication that argues cultural identity should no longer be determined by history—where we come from and how—the Hong Kong story in our case (or even Hong Kong stories), should instead be based on “what we want to become.”27 This imagination, which could provide a kind of collective bonding—that of the “we”—is indeed very similar to Thierry de Duve’s understanding of the core of the political implications of Kantian modern aesthetics, the “as-if” judgment toward a sensus communis.28 We are also perhaps trying not just to bring out the “as- if” in art or in words, but via a kind of demonstrative action in real life.

The politics of disappearance around the ’97 handover, in Abbas’s theory, might be seeing art more as some sort of a container of a historical past, but the post-post-‘97 paradigm is undoubtedly inclined more toward activism. This is why I chose to tell the story of Hong Kong cultural identity as one that is seeking to turn itself into a politics of the local in the making—a politics concerning who is and who is not included (being denied). It is also an aesthetics of what should be taking place, and not following the flow of capital being bought or sold, but something tied to an individual life and committed to the local context.

I was once asked what should be the best planning strategy for the WKCD, heedless of the fact that I think the whole project is problematic and should not be carried out. I replied: It is this “heedless” attitude that is the fundamental problem. Unlike artist Luke Ching Chi Wai, who believed that by initiating people to have a spirit to creatively intervene in everyday life, the West Kowloon Cultural District or M+ projects might then be highjacked and used by people for their own purposes. I still dread facing

138 Vol. 13 No. 2 the coming era of WKCD and M+, and the accompanying marketization of the arts and the cultural. Yet, if I was being asked the same question today, with Boris Groys’s characterization of museums inspiring me, I think I would suggest to have a cemetery as a perfect neighbourhood companion.

Notes 1 Law Wing Sang, Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 9–29. 2 Chang Tsong-Zung, “A Pact of Separate Peace (Hong Kong Report),” Art Asia Pacific, Sample Issue (1993), 17–19. 3 Oscar Ho, “In Search of an Identity (Hong Kong Report),” Art Asia Pacific no. 1 (December 1993), 12–14. 4 David Clarke, Hong Kong Art—Culture and Decolonization (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001). See also Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1997. 5 Lau Kin Wah, ed., Local Accent: 12 Artists from Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, 2003). 6 Longtin (Shum Longtin), Post1997 and Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 2003). 7 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995), 91–95. 8 Law Wing Seng, Re-theorizing Colonial Power (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93–113. 9 Matthew Turner, “Reading Between the Lines,” in Anothermountainanotherman, ed., RedWhiteBlue—Here, There, Everywhere (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations, 2006), n. pag. 10 Chin Wan, “An Alternative History of Red-White-and Blue,” in RedWhiteBlue—Here, There, Everywhere. n. pag. 11 Lau Sai Leung, Dreams of Ny-lon-kong (Hong Kong: Up Publications, 2008). 12 Matthew Turner, “Wicked WKCD,” dIAAAologue–Perspectives, March 2005, www.aaa.org.hk/ Diaaalogue/Details/156/. 13 Lau Kin Wah, “No ‘Local’ is an Island,”Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 5, no. 2 (Summer 2006), 85–91. 14 Lau Kin Wah, “'Local Action' and the Contemporary of Art in Post-Post 97 Hong Kong,” in Samuel Kung, ed., Reversing Horizons: Artists Reflections of The Hong Kong Handover 10th Anniversary (Shanghai: MOCA Shanghai, 2007), 25. 15 Yuk Hui, “Another Kind of Local, Another Kind of Identification, Another Kind of Politics," 146–156; Chow Sze Chung’s “The Birth of the Hong Kong Story,” 126–135; Law Wing Seng, “Approaching the Subjectivity of Locality?,” 168–175, in Local Discourses 1 (2008). 16 Law, Collaborative Colonial Power, 151–198. 17 Chin Wan, Theory of Hong Kong Polis Autonomy (Hong Kong: Enrich Publishing, 2011). 18 Frank Vigneron, I Like Hong Kong—Art and Deterritorization (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010). 19 Lau Kin Wah, “Layers (or the pardon of a narrow glocal vision),” dIAAAlogue—Perspectives (April 2004), http://www.aaa.org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/167/ . 20 Interview with Para/Site Art Space (Alvaro Rodriguez Fominanya), in Lai Tsz-yuen, Topography—12 Interviews with Contemporary Art Istitutions in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Exterior Culture, 2011), 121. 21 “Reflections,” Art Asia Pacific Almanac 2013, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/Almanac2013/ LarsNittve/Zh/. 22 Ma Kwok Ming, "Hong Kong Locality and Local Discourse ," 2013, http://www.inmediahk.net/ node/1017271/. 23 Hong Kong Cultural Policy Study Group/Zuni Icosahedron, "Vision for an Arts Policy of Hong Hong in the 1990's," in In Search of Cultural Policy ’93 (Hong Kong: Zuni Icosahedron and the Hong Kong Cultural Policy Study Group, 1994), 30–32. 24 Yuk Hui and Ashley Wong, "Reclaiming Culture and Creativity from Industry and the UK Creative Economy: Towards New Configurations of the Artistic System," (paper first presented at the European Congress on Aesthetics, "Societies in Crisis" panel at the National Anthropology Museum, Madrid (2010), http://www.doxacollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DOXA_ReclaimingCulture_ Nov2010.pdf/. 25 Yuk Hui, ed., You Must Change Your Life (Hong Kong: Roundtable Synergy, 2012). 26 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 27 Yuk Hui, “Another Kind of Local, Another Kind of Identification, Another Kind of Politics,” Local Discourses 1 (2008), 146.. 28 Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

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