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Polemical Position—Art's Great Leap in Hong Kong and Its Denial of the Local

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Polemical Position—Art's Great Leap in Hong Kong and Its Denial of the Local 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.
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