Views on a Former Periphery: Kong in the Contemporary Art World

Lara van Meeteren | 5835585 Master Thesis Art History (Contemporary Art) University of Faculty of Humanities

Supervisor: mw. dr. Marga van Mechelen Second Examiner: mw. dr. Esther Peeren

Hong Kong | July 2017

2 Contents

ABBREVIATIONS 5

SUMMARY 7

INTRODUCTION 11

CHAPTER 1 | ART FIELDS IN FLUX 15 1.1 Global Art beyond Centre-Periphery? 17 1.2 Stories that the West Tells about Itself 19 1.3 Debunking Universality 23 1.4 Colliding Art Fields 27 1.5 The Social Role of Art 31 1.6 Art after Structural Integration 33

CHAPTER 2 | ARTS OF THE STATE 37 2.1 A Society of Traders and Migrants (1842-1960) 38 2.2 Building the Cultural Desert (1960-1997) 39 2.3 Asia’s Basic City (1997 – now) 46 2.4 Conclusion 53

CHAPTER 3 | HEUNG GEUNG YAN 57 3.1 Modernism 58 3.2 Towards the Handover 65 3.3 Enter the International Art World 73 3.4 Conclusion 80

CHAPTER 4 | ART AFTER AUTONOMY 83 4.1 Chen Tianzhuo, WAWADOLL IS XMAS DATA (2014) 84 4.2 Antony Gormley, Event Horizon (2015) 92 4.3 Add Oil Team, Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016) 97 4.4 Conclusion 105

CONCLUSION 107 REFERENCES 111 IMAGES 119 PICTURES OF HONG KONG 123

3

Abbreviations

ADC Arts Development Council CHC Cultural Heritage Commission HKADC Hong Kong Arts Development Council HKD ICC International Commerce Centre KAF LCSD Leisure and Cultural Services Department PMQ Police Married Quarters SAR Special Administrative Region TST USD United States Dollar WKCDA West Cultural District Authority YBA Young British Artists

Remark on Names Hong Kong is officially a bilingual territory, and English and are official languages of equal status. However, many institutions, organisations and movements with Chinese names (like the New Ink Movement or the City Museum and Art Gallery) do not have a formal English translation. As a result, the translation of these names into English is often not consistent, and many similar but different forms can be found in publications. Wherever this is the case, I have aimed to use the most commonly used translations. Personal names also sometimes have different spellings and orders. In those cases, I have chosen to follow the spelling as used by the persons in question themselves.

5

Summary

In this thesis I set out to understand the conditions for art production, consumption and mediation in Hong Kong, and by extension to reflect on the characteristics of my own Western understanding of art. Especially, I seek to answer the following research question: To what extent does Hong Kong’s particular modernity support a social role of art? I address this question in four chapters. In the first chapter, I develop an analytical framework that structures my discussion of Hong Kong. I start from the observation that artists from around the world are now exhibited in the West and beyond. However, visibility is not equality, as core characteristics of the Western idea of art still pervade the ‘globalised contemporary art world system’.1 This ‘orientalism’ is obscured, as those characteristics exist as implicit all-encompassing norms. I therefore continue to make the Western idea of art explicit, concluding that it is built around the dual core assumptions that art is an autonomous domain and that art works should be understood insulated from the influence of other practices; and that this autonomy of art is the result of a process of modernisation that started in Western Europe and will eventually take place elsewhere as well. As a consequence of this view, on the one hand art is decontextualised, while on the other hand, art that does not fit in the progression of the Western canon is derided, either as traditional or as a derivative. Building on the work of Eistenstadt and Appudarai, as an alternative I suggest instead to think about art in terms of ‘multiple modernities’, and to be sensitive to variations in institutional practices and ideologies in each of these. This translates into the necessity of transfield discourse, in which each of the participants is open to the subjectivities of others. At the same time, this means that normative assumptions that are firmly rooted in separate histories and cultures of participants in this discourse should be made as explicit as possible. For me, that normative assumption centres on the idea that art needs to play a social role; or what I will call critical reflexivity. I stress that the question if art plays a social role is highly dependent on the specific art field under observation. I end this chapter discussing that various developments like neoliberalism, expediency and the growing influence of the market over the last

1 Jonathan Harris, “Gatekeepers, Poachers and Pests in the Globalized Contemporary Art World System,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013): 536.

7 decades are undermining the autonomy of social fields in the West and beyond, resulting in an increasing proliferation of heterogeneous networks. Various authors warn that this is detrimental to the possibilities of a social role of art. I therefore conclude the chapter posing the empirical question if art that is produced in heterogeneous networks can play a social role. I employ this theoretical framework to discuss the specific development of the Hong Kong art field. Chapter 2 discusses the history of the involvement of the Hong Kong government with art, within the context of its particular modernity that is structured by its colonial heritage, the primacy of economic development inside and outside of government, and its uncomfortable position vis-à-vis Mainland . It becomes clear that British colonial government has never supported an autonomous art field and related conceptions of ‘critical reflexive’ art, as this might threaten its position. This aversion to the autonomy of art and its potential for critical reflexivity seems to have survived after the handover. In chapter 3 I explore the consequences of this institutional setting for the critical and reflexive role of art, through an analysis of the contribution of art to critical reflections on a Hong Kong identity, one of the territory’s crucial social issues of the last decades. I argue that the art of the Hong Kong modernists was co-opted by the state to construct an identity from above; that the pre-handover art challenged this conception with an engagement with Hong Kong identity from below; and that the market is framing a Hong Kong identity from the outside, but now for commercial reasons. I conclude that Hong Kong’s formal institutions do not create a fertile climate for a social role of art, but that art nonetheless plays this role through multiple, albeit precarious, initiatives, supported by funding from the Arts Development Council (ADC). Against the background of the conclusion that critical reflexive art is rather restricted within the confines of Hong Kong’s formal art institutions, in chapter 4 I wonder whether heterogeneous art events that are organised outside of these institutions provide alternative avenues for a social role of art. An exploratory analysis of three events – Chen Tianzhuo’s WAWADOLL (2014), Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon (2015), and Add Oil Team’s Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016) – suggests that the impediments for a social role of art in Hong Kong’s particular modernity often carry over to heterogeneous events through the actions of both government and business representatives within collaborations. However, at the

8 same time, I conclude that all three events have produced critical reflexive art, because each time, one of the core participants supported such a role. I argue that art institutions especially play a lasting crucial role in the safeguarding of critical reflexivity in a future of art in heterogeneous networks after autonomy. I conclude that in Hong Kong, the possibilities for a social role of art within formal art institutions are seriously limited as both government and economic elites are wary of this role, while the general public is not accustomed to it. At the same time, I conclude that nonetheless, critical reflexive art is produced and displayed, often however in unexpected places. This contributes to the illegibility of the art field in Hong Kong. In many familiar places that you would visit in the West, often you will not find critical reflexive art. However, on the other hand, unexpected places like shopping malls can and do host worthwhile art events, as the quality of these events entirely depends on the partners and alliances. Arguably, this will also increasingly be the future of the art fields in the former West.

9

Introduction

A friend of mine said that art is a European invention2 Jimmie Durham

When I first arrived in Hong Kong in 2012 it seemed to be an exciting time for the Hong Kong art world. The ambitious M+ museum for visual culture, scheduled to open in 2019, had just bought the Uli Sigg Collection of contemporary Chinese art and started to have an increasingly visible role in the city. Large international blue chip galleries like White Cube, Gagosian and Perrotin were setting up shop and the much-anticipated first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong was about to take place. In peripheral areas of the city, more experimental art spaces and galleries were opening in industrial buildings and Hong Kong-based artists were getting increased international exposure, for instance through the Hong Kong Eye exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in December 2012 and the two year collaboration between Hong Kong’s non-profit art space Spring Workshop and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. Hong Kong’s increasing profile in the global art market as one of the largest art auction centres in the world also generated much attention. The commercial appeal of the city was obvious and it still is: as a tax-free gateway to China’s many billionaires, Hong Kong is the perfect base camp for galleries and auction houses. Around the turn of the century the results of Hong Kong’s branches of Christie’s and Sotheby’s hadn’t been significant, representing 2% of the global revenue in contemporary art at Christie’s and no more than 0.1% at Sotheby’s. But by 2013 it was clear that their perseverance had paid off, as Hong Kong represented respectively 13% and 16% of their contemporary art sales.3 Hong Kong’s emergence as an important global market place had been recent and rapid. My initial reason to go to Hong Kong was the realisation that after many years of studying Western culture I had little to no idea about developments in other parts of the world. I arrived to analyse the Hong Kong art world and discover if and how it differed from its Western counterparts. Initially, I focused on funding, as discussions

2 Jimmie Durham, “A Friend of mine said that Art was a European Invention,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press, 1994), 113. 3 Artprice, Contemporary Art Market: The Artprice Annual Report 2013 (Lyon: Artprice, 2013), 13.

11 on cultural funding were high on the Dutch agenda. I was curious to see how this was organised in a city that is run like a business, reinforced by entrepreneurial government strategies, and where the real estate and financial sectors seems to call the shots. While navigating Hong Kong’s unfamiliar art scene, and becoming an active part of it through studies, research and work, I was increasingly confronted with the characteristics of my Western, even orientalist, perspective, and its inherent limits as well as its strengths. Gradually I was forced to adjust many of my assumptions and opinions. After an eye-opening interview with a collector of contemporary ink art, full of mutual misunderstandings, it dawned on me that I had to ‘provincialise’ Europe and start approaching the art world from the idea that the West is the periphery and Hong Kong the centre. In the following chapters I will discuss what happens when the ‘globalised contemporary art world system’4 collides with a local art scene. I do so from the analytical assumption that this system links up a variety of art fields that are expressions of multiple modernities, relating to localised institutional settings, practices, languages and frameworks of understanding. However, in addition to such a pluralist analytical approach to art fields, I also argue for a normative position that defends a specific role of art: art as a critical reflexive practice with a social role in society, of which Samson Young’s Nothing we did could have saved Hong Kong it was all wasted (2015) on the cover of this thesis is an example. My assumption is that the characteristics of a ‘particular modernity’ (like Hong Kong) influence the extent to which art can play such a role. While recent developments inside and outside of art – increasing expediency, changes in consumption and production of art; the growth of the art market – have an impact on the role of art as well, I furthermore argue that this impact will differ between particular modernities. Against the background of these observations, in the coming chapters I will address the following research question: To what extent does Hong Kong’s particular modernity support a social role of art? I seek to answer this question in four chapters. In the first chapter, I introduce a theoretical framework that will help to structure my discussion of Hong Kong as a former periphery that now firmly is a part of the global art world. Next, chapter 2 discusses the history of art institutions in Hong Kong against the background of the territory’s particular modernity and related colonial history. I conclude that both the

4 Harris, “Gatekeepers,” 536.

12 British coloniser and China, the current sovereign, have never been supportive of art with a social role. Chapter 3 continues with an analysis of the contribution of art to critical discussion in three distinct periods of art production in Hong Kong, examining the contribution of art to ideas about a Hong Kong ‘identity’. While the territory’s formal institutions do not create a fertile climate for a social role of art, art nonetheless plays this role through multiple, albeit precarious, initiatives. Chapter 4 discusses three art events that took place outside traditional art institutions and were realised by networks of heterogeneous contributors. Against the grain of Hong Kong’s particular modernity, these initiatives turn out to offer some possibilities for a social role of art, provided that certain conditions are met. I conclude that these conditions, and not the emergence of heterogeneous events as such, should be central in future discussions about the social role of art.

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1. Art Fields in Flux

For the contemporary visitor of art exhibitions accustomed to see works from every corner of the world it is hard to imagine that not even thirty years ago things were very different. Hermetically closed to Non-Western5 artists, art institutions started to be criticised for their Eurocentrism. However, subsequent waves of internationalism, multiculturalism and identity politics certainly seem to have opened up spaces; spaces to be claimed by people from diverse backgrounds, and spaces in between previously static categories. Do we therefore live in a post-colonial, post-identity, or post-racial age? Most certainly not, Michelle Kuo argues: “we can’t pretend that we’re past those structures of identification that still shape and are shaped by experience, knowledge, and power.”6 Similarly, Derek Gregory compellingly argues that we do not yet live in a post-colonial era, as we are still haunted by traces of colonial history.7 Speaking from personal experience, living in Asia made me realise just how strongly Eurocentric remnants shape deeply engrained conceptions and normative ideas – for instance through my very Western arts education – and how difficult it is to move beyond this ‘habitus’. And while the West might be eager to move on, the former ‘Other’ understandably might disagree. Samson Young, who represents Hong Kong at the 2017 Venice Biennale, thus declares: “Stop telling me to stop dichotomizing the East and the West. I am not done yet. Stop dismissing my site of resistance.”8 A fundamental problem lies at the heart of these opposing positions. While the visibility of Non-Western artists in current exhibitions seems to illustrate that the art world is now open to former ‘Others’, it only is so on Western terms. For, as Amelia Jones stresses, “art history as a discipline remains remarkably conservative and has steadfast ideas about what art is supposed to be – all of which is steeped in its European foundations.”9 As a result, internationalism, multiculturalism and identity

5 For lack of a better term, I will use ‘Non-West’ when referring to those parts of the world that were considered to be in the ‘periphery’ not too long ago; the much used ‘Global South’ does not really make sense when talking about Hong Kong. I will furthermore use a capital ‘N’ to put the ‘Non-West’ on equal footing with the ‘West’. 6 Michelle Kuo, editorial in Art and Identity. Special issue of Artforum 54 (Summer 2016), accessed July 2, 2017, https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201606&id=60094. 7 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1-16. 8 Samson Young, “Artists and Identity,” Artforum 54 (Summer 2016). 9 Jacqueline Bishop, “Renowned feminist art historian Amelia Jones believes that the discipline of art history should be restructured to embrace new narrative and diverse voices,” Huffington Post, January

15 politics all developed within a Western institutional framework, and inclusion hinges on a specific conception of the art world. Kobena Mercer therefore wonders “[w]hether we are really post-identity or whether we’re actually being administered by inclusion.”10 As a result of such arguments, while identity politics are back – or better – back in view, things have changed as well. Crudely, I would say that the tone has shifted from ‘I’m here too, can I please join?’ to ‘Who the f*** do you think you are?’ Kara Keeling phrases it more graciously: “I think that there is an extension of identity politics that’s starting to open up a divergent way – we [as formerly excluded voices] might even begin to imagine how the world might be organized and who or what would be included in that”11 (italics LvM). If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests, in the process we ‘provincialise’ Europe,12 we start to see Europe as just another region, and we will no longer grant its concepts and ideas, helpful as they may be, privilege over other ways of being in the world. If my conception of art is not as universally valid as I thought when arriving in Hong Kong, it might not be sufficient to understand the Hong Kong art field either. In this chapter I therefore seek to develop an alternative conceptual framework to guide my analysis of art in Hong Kong. I will first set the stage with a discussion of the stubborn hegemony of the Western idea of art. Next, I analyse some core characteristics of this idea, discussing what Gregory eloquently calls “the stories that the West most often tells about itself.”13 An examination of the detrimental effects of this idea for ‘other’ practices then results in an argument for a perspective that focuses on ‘mulitple modernities’ and related visions of art outside of the centre. However, in addition to this pluralist analytical approach to art fields, I also argue for a normative position that defends a specific role of art in society: art as a critical reflexive practice with a social role. I will finish the chapter with a discussion of recent developments that potentially undermine such a role, arguing that their impact might be less detrimental in particular modernities; for instance in Hong Kong.

21, 2016, accessed July 2, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacqueline-bishop/renowned-feminist- art-his_b_9038984.html. 10 Huey Copeland, Emily Roydson, Kara Keeling, Michelle Kuo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Joselit, and Kobena Mercer, “Collective Consciousness. A Roundtable,” Artforum 54 (Summer 2016), accessed July 2, https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201606&id=60095. 11 Ibid. 12 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000). 13 Gregory, Colonial Present, 4.

16 1.1 Global Art beyond Centre-Periphery? In 1989, the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in showed the work of fifty artists from the Western world alongside fifty Non-Western artists. Criticised for exoticising ‘Third World’ artists by some, it was equally applauded as a transformative first step to open institutions that up till then had been closed to outsiders. Alfredo Jaar, one of the participating Non-Western artists, in hindsight identified this “first crack in the Western art bunker” as a point of no return.14 Little over a decade earlier, Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism had exposed the uneven power structures between the West and the Rest of the world, showing that the desire to classify, structure and thereby dominate the Other was deeply engrained in Western society.15 Strongly influenced by these arguments, Rasheed Araeen, another artist that participated in Magiciens de la Terre, would establish Third Text in 1987, just two years before the Magiciens exhibition. The journal’s subtitle, Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, left little doubt about its aim: “Third Text represents a historical shift away from the centre of the dominant culture to its periphery in order to consider the centre critically.”16 Upon first view, the Western art world and its institutions slowly seemed to have taken this criticism to heart. The work of artists from all over the world has been increasingly exhibited in the West and beyond. This growing presence of artists from the former ‘periphery’ could have been viewed as an enrichment of the existing, predominantly Western, art history. However, Hans Belting suggests that it might not always be easy to accept for “Western art criticism”, especially because it is “wishful thinking to keep [global art] under Western guidance and within the precincts of familiar institutions.”17 Similarly, according to Peter Weibel – interestingly speaking of ‘they’ instead of ‘we’ – this might not be easy for a society that is accustomed to a certain status quo:

14 Jelle Bouwhuis in conversation with Alfredo Jaar, “Cracks in the Western art bunker,” in PROJECT 1975 Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious (Amsterdam: SMBA Publishing, 2014), 133. 15 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 16 Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning. Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” epilogue in The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen (London: Continuum, 2002), 333. 17 Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 40.

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Now, for the first time they find themselves in the situation – or at least potentially in a situation – where other states determine who is included and excluded. (..) This is creating unrest and anxiety in the West.18

In view of such anxiety, it is perhaps not surprising that the West has developed strategies to effectively neutralise Otherness. Julian Stallabrass, for instance, quotes Žižek in arguing that the West “is only comfortable with otherness as long as it is not really other”.19 Many authors, like Gerardo Mosquera, also have expressed concern about the existence of an international style that functions as a prerequisite for acceptance on the global stage of contemporary art – and by extension as a new exclusion mechanism.20 There is no questioning the fact that artists from around the world are now visible on the international stage of contemporary art. The extent to which the resulting reality is based on equality, however, is clearly up for debate. After all, as Araeen reminds us, visibility is by no means the same as equality: Multiculturalism is not about the equality of all cultures but how the dominant culture can accommodate those who have no power in such a way so that the power of the dominant is preserved.21

The thought that the present situation might still be haunted by the spectre of Orientalism looms large, and Said’s words inevitably spring to mind: Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.22

Former West, the title and theme of a long-term research project initiated by Utrecht based art space BAK in 2008, offers a striking insight into the resulting dilemmas. Criticising the idea that the position of the West could somehow remain the same after the end of the Cold War, it argues that the West should also fundamentally reconsider its position. Similarly, Araeen suggests that “postcoloniality is the condition of both: those who were once the colonizer and the colonized, and only when we recognize this can we establish a new relationship based on human

18 Peter Weibel, “Globalization and Contemporary Art,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 20. 19 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated. The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 70. 20 Gerardo Mosquera, “Beyond Anthropophagy: Art, Internationalization, and Cultural Dynamics,” in Belting, Global Contemporary, 237. 21 Araeen, “A New Beginning,” 341. 22 Said, Orientalism, 7.

18 equality.”23 In 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that this is only possible if ‘we’ ‘provincialise Europe’: a decentring of “an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought.”24 And possibly, the invisibility that comes with these ‘received ideas’ accommodates the endurance of Western hegemony. For, as Russell Ferguson argues that [i]n our society dominant discourse tries never to speak its own name. Its authority is based on absence. The absence is not just that of the various groups classified as ‘other’, although members of these groups are routinely denied power. It is also the lack of any overt knowledge of the specificity of the dominant culture, which is simply assumed to be the all-encompassing norm. This is the basis of its power.25

Taking this into account, it is clear that an attempt to overcome the existing Western hegemony, for instance in discussions about art, has to make the assumptions behind the Western discourse visible, so that it can no longer pose as the implicit norm, oblivious of its own constitution.

1.2 Stories that the West Tells about Itself How to characterise the Western idea of art? Obviously, there is no unambiguous answer to this immense question. However, here I want to argue that it is possible to distil at least two interrelated ‘stories’, central to this conception of art, that each hide implicit norms, namely autonomy, and the supposed universality of a temporal concept of modernity. Since hidden assumptions often can be seen more clearly from a distance than from the centre, I start the discussion of these ‘stories’ through the work of two non-Western critics of the Western idea of art: Okwui Enwezor and Gao Minglu. To start with autonomy, in The Postcolonial Constellation, Enwezor criticises contemporary international curatorial practices as an extension of the hegemony of the Western art conception. He illustrates the core of this conception through a discussion of the curatorial ideas behind the display of Tate Modern’s permanent collection at its opening in 2000, coincidentally overseen by then director Lars Nittve, who we will meet again in Chapter 2. Approvingly Enwezor discusses the decision to break with a chronological presentation, which would be inadequate in

23 Rasheed Araeen, “Art and Postcolonial Society,” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 366. 24 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. 25 Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 11.

19 today’s heterogeneous, post-colonial setting. At the same time he objects to the persistent suggestion of continuity; seeking to connect modern and contemporary art, the artworks on display are presented as logical heirs to other works in the Western art tradition. Hereby, the presentation reinforces the assumption that the only valid way to interpret art objects is through its own – Western – art context. This, he argues is “typical of the cynicism towards any socially and historically determined analysis of the object of discourse in a museum of modern art.”26 Taking the example of the display of African sculpture in Western institutions, Enwezor continues that, as a result, “non-Western objects (..) first must shed their utilitarian function and undergo a conversion from ritual objects of magic to reified objects of art.”27 For Enwezor, this epitomises one of the core characteristics of the Western idea of art: that art is, and should be, autonomous from other social domains. Not surprisingly, therefore, autonomy is the cornerstone of various well-known Western art theories. Take, for instance, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno or George Dickie who each present autonomy as the core of their understanding of art by demarcating its inside and outside, albeit clearly in very different ways.28 This relates to the idea of art as a separate domain, that interacts with and comments on the external world, while being relatively autonomous to make value judgements free from any instrumentalised notion of art and culture, as art should not have to adhere to any externally determined purpose. Taking a step back, it becomes evident that this idea of art as a separate, autonomous domain relates to another big story that the West tells about itself, namely structural differentiation as the fundamental characteristic of Western modernity. According to Ulrich Beck, sociologists such as Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann see modern Western society as the outcome of a process where “the political sphere splits off from the economic one, the scientific sphere from the political one, and so on.”29 For Niklas Luhmann, art is just one autonomous social ‘subsystem’ amongst many. He argues that these ‘closed’ subsystems function

26 Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 61. 27 Ibid. 28 For a further discussion on different usages of the concept autonomy in art, see for instance: Andrea Fraser, “Autonomy and Its Contradictions,” Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, May 1, 2012, accessed July 16, 2016, http://onlineopen.org/autonomy-and-its-contradictions. 29 Beck, Reinvention of Politics, 24.

20 according to their own laws or ‘binary codes’.30 In an alternative analysis, Pierre Bourdieu depicts structural differentiation as a process of the emergence of relatively autonomous ‘fields’, one of which is the art field. These fields translate into the ‘habitus’ of social actors operating in these fields: embodied dispositions that structure how social actors perceive the world and guide their actions. In The Field of Cultural Production,31 Bourdieu shows that the literary field displays a historical tendency towards autonomy, which translates into specific codes of conduct of those invested in this field. In the wider field of art, such ‘rules of the game’ for instance include ideas about professional roles and appropriate locations to show art.32 Structural differentiation as foundational characteristic of modern society links the birth of autonomous art to a standardised process. Enter Gao Minglu, who in Total Modernity states that Western “‘modernity’ is about a historical time and epoch”, dividing human history in pre-modern, modern and post-modern periods. This temporal division corresponds with the use of concepts such as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, which in the West became shorthand for ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress’ respectively.33 For Eisenstadt, theories of modernisation “all assumed, even if only implicitly, that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies.”34 As this succession of epochs was presented as a universal roadmap for social progress, everything that was non-modern – i.e. different from Western modernity – became automatically pre-modern. Or, as Jameson suggests in A Singular Modernity, the non-modern “is unavoidably drawn back into a force field in which it tends to connote the ‘pre-modern’ exclusively.”35 Western modernisation thus came to be regarded as a universal process, a necessary trajectory that every society would follow. This is what Chakrabarty calls “the ‘first in

30 Francis Halsall, “Niklas Luhmann,” in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 187. 31 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 33. 32 Both Bourdieu and Luhmann argue that in modern Western society, the autonomy of art is not an exception but rather the rule. But while Luhmann postulates autonomy as a necessity, Bourdieu provides an empirical description and his framework is open to the historical possibility of a diminishing autonomy of art and the crossing of boundaries between fields. As a result, Bourdieu’s framework is more useful for analysing multiple modernities (see section 1.3), as well as processes of structural integration that, as I will conclude in section 1.6, characterise the last decades. 33 Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 2. 34 S.N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1, (Winter 2000): 1. 35 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 215.

22 Europe and then elsewhere’ structure of time”, which automatically relegates places that are ‘not yet’, or only partially, modern to the “imaginary waiting room of history.”36 This must sound very familiar to people accustomed to the discourse on emerging art worlds that supposedly do not ‘yet’ have a ‘mature art eco-system’. It makes clear that the seemingly innocent demand for art’s autonomy inadvertently results in the not so innocent demand that others should follow the same path towards Western modernity, as they are otherwise ‘immature’ or ‘traditional’. In other words, these core ideas of Western art are logically connected sides of the same coin.

1.3 Debunking Universality What are the shortcomings of this framework when encountering global art in its myriad forms? According to Enwezor, the Western requirement that art should be autonomous from other social domains is problematic because it renders other layers of meaning in artistic production invisible; after all, in the Western mind, art has to be regarded separate from the religious, moral, political, etc. As a result, Western approaches to Non-Western art, like African sculpture, hardly ever seem to move beyond formal aesthetic analysis. The Western mind, for instance, finds it hard to accommodate an understanding of the relationship between brushstroke and the moral superiority of the artist, which is an important element of the practice of Chinese ink art and its interpretation. Enwezor implicitly exposes one of the core problems of the initial multiculturalism in Western art institutions: open for art from any region, it still required autonomy. Anne Ring Petersen accentuates the inherent contradiction between these two: institutional multiculturalism’s appeal for a “critical analysis of Western art institutions and art history with a view to disclosing their ethno-centric and racist structures and practices” clashes with the “call for a greater focus on art as significant in itself, not just as a vehicle for identity politics or for cultural and anthropological concerns (..).” She elaborates: [t]he first one articulates a demand for revolutionary changes in the practices and structures of the Western art institutions from a position in postcolonial theory and multicultural identity politics. Contrary to this, the second evokes a fundamentally Western ideal of autonomous art.37

36 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8. 37 Anne Ring Petersen, “Identity Politics, Institutional Multiculturalism, and the Global Artworld,” Third Text 26, no. 2 (2012): 196-197.

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Enwezor argues that the inability to look beyond the art context – anchored in the Western history of art – still informs international curatorial practice. This is problematic, since “the conditions of production and reception of contemporary art evince a dramatic multiplication of its systems of articulation to the degree that no singular judgment could contain all its peculiarities.”38 James Elkins uses similar arguments in Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. He stresses that we cannot do justice to Non-Western art, because we still perceive it through the framework of Western art history: “[t]he entire interpretive apparatus of contemporary art historical scholarship is demonstrably Western.”39 As a result, “[t]he project of writing art history is Western, and so any history of Chinese landscape painting is partly but fundamentally a Western endeavour, even if it is written by a Chinese historian, in Chinese, for Chinese readers.”40 Elkins’ antagonistic tone is likely to offend, but that does not deny the fact that he makes valid points. Especially enlightening is his reference to the practice of comparison, including “any terms, theories, or ideas that are taken to help elucidate an unfamiliar art.” 41 With this reference Elkins raises the issue of transcultural discussions. While some might feel that comparison is inherent to such discourse, for Elkins “comparison probably says less about recurring patterns of art history across cultures than about patterns that Western art historical practice automatically finds in other cultures.”42 In other words, Elkins exposes art historical practice as a continuous Rorschach test; our not so innocent eye does not find inherent ‘true’ parallels between artworks in different contexts, but creates those through ‘projection’. We see what we know. The painful consequence of the projection of preconceived worldviews is that ‘alien’ objects are either traditional (and thereby irrelevant) or a derivative. The reception of the 2016 exhibition of Bhupen Khakhar in Tate Modern illustrates this clearly. Khakhar is a highly regarded modernist painter in his native India. However, in a review in the Guardian, rife with comparisons of Khakhar’s work to Western predecessors and contemporaries, Jonathan Jones is clearly unable to look beyond the established trajectories of art in Europe and America, when he wonders: “Why is Tate

38 Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation,” 69. 39 James Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 140. 40 Ibid,, 57. 41 Ibid.,10. 42 Ibid., 5.

24

Modern exhibiting an old-fashioned, second-rate artist whose art recalls the kind of British painters it would never let through its doors?”43 The review caused an outcry from the entire Indian art establishment. Geeta Kapur, the grande dame of Indian art criticism who has been criticising the universalising thrust of the Western conception of modernism for decades, countered that Jones was “(still) writing like a provincial Englishman. (..) Using discarded art historical categories, he repeats (by rote) well- enshrined modernist criteria and yet claims partisanship with advanced art that should, he says, be the remit of the Tate Modern.”44 Perhaps, the Western kneejerk ‘been there done that’ reaction needs to be reconsidered. Maybe the significance of Bhupen Khakhar’s work in India is more relevant than its possible resemblance to art works in other contexts, which is foregrounded by the Western history of art. After all, it is very likely that a work of art that resembles something familiar to a Western eye has a completely different connotation in its original context. On top of this, for others ‘our’ Western canonical examples of high art might seem to be derivatives as well, unsophisticated even when compared to other art practices. Take a look at cubism, for instance, through the eyes of a practitioner of African sculpture; would they not miss finesse in the crude renditions of Picasso and Braque? And would a calligraphy expert not be dismayed by Van Gogh’s Japanese inspired Hiroshige paintings, as I started to realise after an offhand remark by a young Taiwanese artist.45 When such criticism is directed at ‘our’ masterpieces, we tend to argue that ‘they’ miss the point of these works. But why then, would ‘we’ be exempted from missing a point somewhere else? Clearly, transcultural encounters without situated contextual enquiry are inadequate, and worse, reinforcing power structures. There is another important problem that relates to the Western belief in a universal progression of art according to the modern/traditional dichotomy: the impossibility to come to terms with the ‘traditional’ in modern or contemporary art, in subject matter, style or medium. Thus, Gao Minglu argues that

43 Jonathan Jones, “Bhupen Khakhar review – Mumbai’s answer to Beryl Cook,” The Guardian, May 31, 2016, accessed July 2, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/31/bhupen- khakhar-review-you-cant-please-all-tate-modern. 44 Geeta Kapur, “Guardian Review of Bhupen Khakhar at Tate Narrow-Minded: Geeta Kapur,” The Wire, June 5, 2016, accessed July 2, 2017, https://thewire.in/40568/guardian-review-of-bhupen- khakhar-at-tate-narrow-minded-geeta-kapur/. 45 “Such bad calligraphy!” Wu Chi-tsung, conversation with the author, April 2016.

26 [u]sing these categories [modern versus traditional], the history and art of Third World countries has been judged against the principle of Euro-American modernity and reduced to either old or new, past or future. As a result, negative judgments on modern and contemporary non-western literature and art (..) are ubiquitous in studies of these fields.46

Or, as Jonathan Hay adds: “[t]he Rest – as the nonmodern/premodern – is assigned the false subjecthood of the traditional, which in its diverse forms either evacuates history or makes it finite.”47 Together, these arguments paint a grim picture of the consequences of the Western idea of art for the reception of Non-Western art: 1) the Western idea denounces ‘art’ that extends beyond the boundaries of the art system, and is thus incapable to do other practices that have such linkages justice; 2) it interprets Non- Western artworks from its own history, and is thus incapable to do those artworks justice; and 3) it condemns tradition as a source to develop alternative identities, and is thus again incapable to do other practices justice. Clearly, the often-implicit Western idea of art stands in the way of productive transcultural discussions.

1.4 Colliding Art Fields Up until this point, I have spoken in detail about the Western conception of modernity on the one hand, and a generic ‘bloc’ resisting this modernity on the other. However, when distancing ourselves from the hegemonic Western world view, it becomes clear that this world of resisting ‘Others’ is evidently made up of highly diverse cultures, peoples and practices. I follow Eisenstadt in arguing that this kaleidoscopic world should be interpreted as a constellation of ‘multiple modernities’. Eisenstadt argues that structural differentiation has transformed most societies from traditional to modern, but he stresses that this has created a diversity of institutional patterns and related practices. In contradistinction to conceived Western ideas of what ‘being modern’ entails, for Eisenstadt these other patterns are distinctively modern as well: “Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others.”48 Eisenstadt’s position infers that none of these modernities should be a-priori

46 Gao, Total Modernity, 2. 47 Jonathan Hay, “Double Modernity, Para-Modernity,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, and Terry Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 113-114. 48 Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities”, 2-3.

27 privileged over others. There should be openness to other modernities, and a willingness to understand those modernities as empirical realities. This does not mean that we cannot judge other modernities. From our own normative beliefs we can certainly do so; but no judgement can be seen as a-priori correct. Eisenstadt adds that the relationship between particular modernities and the original Western project is usually ambivalent, for while the original Western project constituted the crucial reference point, at the same time “many movements that developed in non-Western societies articulated strong anti-Western or even anti-modern themes.”49 Eisenstadt’s attention for the relations between multiple modernities can be further explored through Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of globalisation. Writing in the early stages of the globalisation debate in the 1990s, Appudarai argues that [t]he new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries).50

In Appadurai’s mind, there is no pre-determined direction of the travel of practices, objects or ideas. Instead, he suggests thinking of global culture in terms of flows that relate to each other in continuously changing constellations and that are fundamentally context dependent. Ever since globalisation appeared on the radar of academia there has been debate about its presumed homogenising effect on culture, which was often seen as ‘Americanisation’ or ‘commodification’ – which would be in line with a centre-periphery model. Appadurai addresses these fears when he writes: What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way (..).51

In other words, as soon as global practices ‘land’ somewhere they are ‘molded’ to fit in with the receiving context. Appadurai’s attention for this ‘travel’ of ‘forces’ is very useful when analysing ‘Other’ places like Hong Kong, as it makes clear that certain practices, objects or notions have different meanings in different parts of the world. Combining the work of Eisenstadt and Appudarai, I thus argue that the new constellation should be seen as a multitude of modernities, and that flows of ‘forces’ travel between them, while landing in specific local ways.

49 Ibid., 2 50 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions in Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32. 51 Ibid.

28 What do the concepts of multiple modernities and flows imply for art? Borrowing Bourdieu’s terminology, the consequence is that there is not just one international art field, but instead a multiplicity of art fields in different places around the world. Hans Belting makes a similar observation, when he writes that [t]he last remaining stronghold of the Western art concept is the notion of a single and independent art world which is believed to survive even today as a global art world, again in the singular. But, in fact, this belief is contradicted by the recent emergence of several art worlds that coexist and compete in the wake of the global practice of contemporary art.52

With Eisenstadt we understand that “the ways in which these [art fields are] defined and organized varie[s] greatly, in different periods of their development, giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns.” 53 With Appudarai, it becomes clear that the history of Western art is still very relevant for these Non-Western art fields since its ideas and institutions have travelled and become indigenised. In other words, upon landing in specific places, Western ideas and institutions have taken on their own shape and meaning as they were ‘fit into’ the situation on the ground. It is in this way, that Dipesh Chakrabarty does not reject the existing (European) framework of knowledge entirely because it is “at once both indispensable and inadequate (..) and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought – which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all – may be renewed from and for the margins.”54 For practices in the Non-West, there is a dual quality when embracing Western elements that makes it less or more desirable depending on one's positionality. A discussion of some examples from the Chinese art field can help to illustrate. As Wu Hung writes, in 1980s China the embracing of Western practices functioned as a subversive gesture. By rejecting painting and adopting an international (i.e. Western) art language through the use of other media, artists at that time were able to establish an ‘outside’ position, independent of Chinese official and academic art. This was empowering “because what they reject[ed was] not just a particular art form or medium but an entire art system, including education, exhibition, publication,

52 Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, “From Art World to Art Worlds,” in Belting, Global Contemporary, 28. 53 Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 2. 54 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.

29 and employment.”55 However, a very different picture emerges when we look at the reception within China about a decade later of cynical realism and political pop, two styles that incorporated Western elements as well. As Gao Minglu writes, this “facile combination of socialist propaganda and consumerist symbols (..) has been criticized as opportunistic by many Chinese artists and art critics.”56 In different periods, Western practices have thus clearly played different roles in Chinese art, resulting in different receptions. Furthermore, the latter example also illustrates misreadings arising from exchanges between people functioning in different art fields (or what I call ‘transfield’ exchanges), involving processes of what Wu Hung calls ‘decontextualisation’ and ‘recontextualisation’.57 In the Western world, art works belonging to the cynical realism and political pop styles are consistently seen as “representatives of an ‘underground’ or ‘dissident’ art under a communist regime.”58 As Gao Minglu’s above quote clearly illustrates, this view is not at all shared by Chinese art world insiders, including Wu Hung and Carol Yinghua Lu.59 This discrepancy in the reception of political pop and cynical realism between the West and China illustrates the difficulty of transfield discussions. The picture is further complicated when we realise that the subversive gesture of the embrace of a Western art language ‘at home’, like the 1980s era Chinese art, is easily lost when this art comes into contact with the larger ‘international’ art world.60 Apart from substantive aspects of art, the modern idea of art as a differentiated field and its related institutions such as museums have travelled as well. Again, these travelled institutions cannot be taken at face value, as they are also ‘molded into’ the context in which they land. Curator and critic Carol Yinghua Lu gives multiple examples of Western art world institutions and practices that have been adopted in

55 Wu Hung, “A Case of Being “Contemporary”: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Contemporary Art in Asia. A Critical Reader, ed. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 391-414, 399. 56 Mónica Amor et al., “Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (1998): 38. 57 Wu, “Case of Being “Contemporary”,” 402-405. 58 Ibid., 404. 59 See for instance Wu Hung (ibid.) and Carol Yinghua Lu, “From the Anxiety of Participation to the Process of De-Internationalization,” in e-flux journal 70 (February 2016), accessed July 2, 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60556/from-the-anxiety-of-participation-to-the-process-of-de- internationalization/. 60 Wu, “Case of Being “Contemporary”.”

30 China in name, but in reality are not what you would expect from a Western standpoint: [t]hroughout the past two decades, under the influence of the art market, an infrastructure for contemporary art has slowly taken shape. Yet although it bears all the familiar characteristics of a mature art system – with galleries, contemporary art museums, art magazines, collections, art centers, archives, and so on – a lot of them are just forms without real substance.61

She adds other examples of the skewed relations in the field: art magazines without critical content; art museums without curatorial ambitions that mostly rent out space; triennials that are founded and curated by private gallerists in order to enhance the reputation of the artists that they represent; and art historians that have questionable motives when compiling handbooks for Chinese contemporary art.62 Clearly, it will not be very helpful to use a Western frame of reference when navigating the Chinese art field, as then nothing is what it seems.

1.5 The Social Role of Art Transfield discourse necessitates an empirical curiosity in others and thereby an openness to difference. As anybody accustomed to such discourse will probably confirm, and as the examples of the previous sections clearly illustrate, in itself this is difficult enough. From personal experience, I have realised that transcultural discourse is especially challenging as this empirical openness to others needs to be negotiated with sometimes dearly held normative positions, which are firmly grounded in one’s own history and culture. After all, without such positions it becomes hard to say anything meaningful at all. Stated differently: How do I marry my empirical interest in the particular modernity of Hong Kong and related artistic practices with normative positions about the role and functioning of art? Such questions have to be asked by all participants to transfield discourse, in a situation that is highly charged by a very recent history of Western hegemony, reminding us of Samson Young’s understandably angry quote in the introduction to this chapter. Of course, the question about my normative position necessitates an answer, as this answer will also determine my treatment of the development of art in Hong Kong in the following chapters. In response, I go back to the argument of Chakrabarty

61 Carol Yinghua Lu, “Back to Contemporary: One Contemporary Ambition, Many Worlds,” e-flux journal 11 (December 2009), accessed July 2, 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61349/back-to- contemporary-one-contemporary-ambition-many-worlds/. 62 Ibid.

31 in the previous section, that European thought is at once inadequate and indispensible. It is inadequate because particular modernities are expressions of ideas and structures that the hegemonic Western discourse disregards; but it is also indispensible as Western modernity as a travelled practice is in different ways now everybody’s heritage and affects us all. Following this position, I argue that my analysis of Hong Kong, on which I report in the following chapters, needs to start from a fundamental bracketing of my own position and concurrent openness to the positions of equal others; but at the same time, I also have to explicitly formulate my normative positions as input to an open conversation. In short, while approaching Hong Kong’s art field with an open gaze, I also need to clearly formulate my own departure point. For me, that departure point is the Adornian idea that art should function autonomously from outside influences – political, economic, etc. – so that it can reflect on the state of society and thus realise its critical potential. Broadly supported over time, recently this idea – to which I refer using the shorthand terms ‘social role of art’ and ‘critical reflexivity’ – continues to receive attention. Brian Holmes, for instance, argues that “[a]rt can offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding.”63 Chantal Mouffe makes it more political, arguing that artists can play an important role in the hegemonic struggle by subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of new subjectivities.64

Political or not, the degree to which art plays a social role is directly dependent on the specific art field within which it is produced, consumed and mediated, and its social role therefore has to be discussed from a contextualised understanding. Art that plays a social role in one context might be rather irrelevant in another. The idea of the importance of a social role of art might have originated in Western Europe, but with Chakrabarty it is also clear that it is now our common heritage. Can we renew this idea from the margins and see if and how it can play a meaningful role in a former periphery like Hong Kong; especially at a time, when, as I discuss in the following section, this critical role might be under siege?

63 Brian Holmes, “Artistic autonomy and the communication society,” Third Text 18, no. 6 (2004): 549. 64 Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (2007), accessed July 2, 2017, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html.

32 1.6 Art after Structural Integration While the particular modernity of specific art fields influences the extent to which art can play a social role, various recent developments inside and outside of art influence this as well. Specifically, various authors observe a growing focus on the utility of art for other domains. Art is presented as a means to help cities become global, to improve urban economies through creative industries, to enhance social cohesion, or to brand and sell products. In The Expediency of Culture George Yúdice suggests that this is a universal development: “culture is invoked to solve problems that previously were the province of economics and politics.”65 On top of this, following budget cuts, traditional art institutions increasingly ‘professionalise’ their operations, for instance by shifting attention towards exhibitions that provide ‘experiences’ for large audiences. These changes are also stimulated by the growing influence of the art market. As the logics of economic thought have gradually crept into the entire art field, the codes of conduct in the art field are fundamentally changed. Drawing parallels with Chiapello and Boltanski’s New Spirit of Capitalism, Claire Bishop argues that especially for the ‘post-studio site-responsive artist’ and ‘the roving global curator’ a successful project is not one that has intrinsic value, but one that allows the worker to integrate him/herself into a new project afterwards; in other words, a good project is one that is generative of further projects through the connections he/she has established.66

For Isabelle Graw this coincides with changes in arts education, as the emphasis has shifted from autonomous art production to marketing and professionalisation.67 In such a goal- and profit-oriented environment, artistic autonomy is no longer the leading motive while creation for the market has lost its stigma.68 Paradoxically, as a consequence of these developments art now seems to be everywhere. Boundaries between art and other domains that were carefully built over time are disappearing, for instance between the museum store, art gallery and luxury good shop. It also becomes harder to discern artworks from luxury goods, political

65 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. 66 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 215-216. 67 Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 84. 68 Isabelle Graw, “In the Grip of the Market? On the Relative Heteronomy of Art, the Art World, and Art Criticism,” in Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, ed. Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 194.

33 instruments, entertainment experiences, economic commodities and branding tools. Of course, the art field is not the only social domain experiencing a transgression of boundaries. While, as I discussed in section 1.2, social scientists in the West initially presented the emergence of differentiated social domains as the result of modernisation, in recent decades they started to stress that we are now experiencing processes of functional or structural dedifferentiation (also called coordination or integration). According to Ulrich Beck, for instance, we have entered a new stage of ‘reflexive modernisation’, in which modern social forms are being transformed themselves: The questions of functional differentiation are replaced by the questions of functional coordination, cross-linking, harmonization, synthesis, and so on. (..) The way systems of activity are delineated becomes problematic because of the consequences it produces. Why does one delimit science from economics, economics from politics or politics from science in this way, and why can they not be intermeshed and ‘sectioned’ any other way in regard to tasks and responsibilities? (..) Empirically considered, does modernity actually roll along in the form of further and further differentiations? (..) Are there not concrete And experiments underway everywhere, in which the ‘binary codes’, thought to be strictly separated (..) are being applied to one another, combined and fused?69

In an even more fundamental critique of modernisation theory, Bruno Latour argues that We Have Never Been Modern in the first place, as the world has always consisted of ‘hybrids’: networks that bind together heterogeneous elements from supposedly autonomous spheres 70 Either way, in our emerging reality boundaries are transgressed. Old binaries – true/false; good/bad; beautiful/ugly; profitable/useless – might live on, but they are not exclusively bound to specific social fields. Speaking about the art field, Isabelle Graw notices that this dedifferentiation “implies a structural alignment of the art world to other social systems.”71 While some enthusiastically embrace this transformation or ‘realistically’ accept it, others critically warn for the negative consequences for art and its social role. Authors like Sven Lutticken and Pascal Gielen acknowledge that it becomes ever harder to classify ‘hybrids’ existing in a reality after binaries, but they also lament the resulting demise

69 Beck, Reinvention of Politics, 27. 70 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 71 Graw, High Price, 145.

34 of art’s autonomy.72 Gielen, for instance, argues that the existence of autonomous domains was supportive of a social role of art: To understand the world as consisting of various domains that have their own value regimes not only opens up the possibility of critique: it offers us the chance to move from one world to another, making it possible for us to continuously observe, appreciate and evaluate events and our own actions, from different perspectives. (..) The push to be more entrepreneurial and to embrace the creative industry is supposed to convince us that only one world matters. Such a reduction leads to a shrinking of the imaginative horizon and, at the same time, to the evaporation of the modern hope for autonomy.73

Likewise, Peter Marcuse for instance argues that [c]ulture (..) is promoted as a contributor to economic development, as fostering the growth of an economically productive creative class. In the process, its critical and transcendent potential has been eviscerated. While such instrumentalization may help artists in the short run, it also poses a danger to the ultimate social role of the arts.74

Like Marcuse, Gielen is concerned that in a new reality of heterogeneous networks, art will lose its social role, as it becomes commodity, lifestyle or instrument. If art is everything, maybe it’s nothing? Dissolved in heterogeneous networks it abides to requirements from elsewhere. Such criticism is relatively common in Western art fields, where autonomous art institutions were once firmly rooted, but it is more rare in former peripheries that often do not have a tradition of independent institutions. Here, the idea that art can and should play a social role is often not institutionalised, and the effects of expediency, neoliberalism and market might be felt more dramatically as a result. Despite these concerns about the social role of art in an increasingly dedifferentiated world, maybe we do not need to hang on to the old institutional forms of autonomous fields to safeguard this role. Ulrich Beck, for instance, wonders if it isn’t possible to organise ‘system harmonisation’ that allows for autonomy and coordination. 75 In a discussion of new museum settings, Hall Foster argues against a dystopian ‘either-or’ that sees the demise of critical art through entertainment, arguing instead that we have to look for productive ways to combine both functions: “if designed and programmed intelligently, museums can allow for both entertainment

72 Pascal Gielen, “Autonomy via Heteronomy,” Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, October 1, 2013, accessed January 31, 2016, http://onlineopen.org/autonomy-via-heteronomy. 73 Ibid. 74 Peter Marcuse, “The Production of Regime Culture and Instrumentalized Art in a Globalizing State,” Globalizations 4, no. 1 (2007), 15. 75 Beck, Reinvention of Politics, 27.

35 and contemplation, and promote some understanding along the way.”76 Meanwhile, Isabelle Graw suggests that we have entered a world of ‘relative heteronomy’, where external constraints on the artist prevail. In her opinion, in this new setting “[i]t is crucial to note that these constraints can be fought against (..).”77 Similarly, Pascal Gielen also argues that it is a waste of time to try to stop the new reality of networked heterogeneous art initiatives. He stresses the importance of the heterogeneous funding of such projects, so that at least one of the parties in these projects is willing to safeguard the critical function of art.78 Attention for the enduring possibility of a social role of art in a world of heterogeneous networks becomes even more urgent when we realise that new social media have undermined hierarchical communication, resulting in the emergence of knowledge ‘bubbles’. Can art really play a social role in such a decentralised world, if it only takes place within clearly defined art institutions that are visited by a small number of art experts, whose opinions might not reach many as they are limited to specific bubbles? Is it really realistic that in such a setting new subjectivities will still trickle down to the ‘masses’, if they ever did? Or do new boundary-crossing networks actually provide a possibility to reach new audiences? And couldn’t this be especially promising in the particular modernities of former peripheries – like Hong Kong – that might never have seen autonomous art fields in the first place? Of course, we have to beware a naive optimism; and obviously it is important to warn for inherent dangers. Concern is thus certainly warranted, but maybe it is a little bit too early for pessimism. It should be an empirical question if art can (or does) play a social role in a dedifferentiated world of heterogeneous networks. If so, where and under which conditions? And which new institutional guarantees – norms, rules, means – would help to support and safeguard such a role? These questions will guide my analysis of art ‘events’ produced in heterogeneous networks in Hong Kong in Chapter 4.

76 Hal Foster, “After the White Cube,” London Review of Books 37, no. 6 (2015), 26. 77 Graw, High Price, 141. 78 Gielen, “Autonomy via Heteronomy.”

36 2. Arts of the State

When Lars Nittve arrived as Executive Director of M+, Hong Kong’s new ‘world- class’ institute for visual culture set to redefine the museum, in January 2011, he was confident and optimistic. In early interviews he alluded to the Museum of Modern Art in 1940s New York. Just as around that time the balance in both museum practices and art production had shifted from Europe to the US, we might now be witnessing a similar shift from Euro-America towards Asia, he seemed to suggest. And Hong Kong held the best cards to become the epicentre of this development.79 Five years on, when the foundation of the building had only just been laid, Nittve has already resigned. He was not leaving Hong Kong for another job, he stressed: “I want to live in my mountain house in Sweden and write more.”80 The parting was perfectly civilised and deplete of any dirty laundry, which may or may not result from a hefty farewell premium. This wasn’t the first departure from the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA), the overarching body in charge of the HKD 24 billion development of which M+ is part. After eight years, the Authority is already on its fourth chairman. In 2011 speculation was “rife that over-the-top government bureaucracy may have played a part.”81 Art critic Oscar Ho spoke the mind of many Hong Kong art world insiders: “[t]he cultural infrastructure has been problematic, with non-professionals making decisions in professional areas. If this continues, world-class professionals will not stay here to play this game (..).”82 Eventually Hong Kong government ‘fixed’ this problem, appointing a local senior civil servant instead of a leading international professional to the position. Duncan Pescod’s long career included remarkable positions but strikingly, leading cultural institutions was not amongst them.83 Probably, he will not create the related authority problems either.

79 Selina Ting, “Interview: Lars NITTVE”, Initiart Magazine, undated, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.initiartmagazine.com/interview.php?IVarchive=57. 80 Enid Tsui, “Lars Nittve: why I’m quitting Hong Kong arts hub role,” South China Morning Post, October 28, 2015, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts- entertainment/article/1873107/lars-nittve-why-im-quitting-hong-kong-arts-hub-role. 81 Vivienne Chow, “Sudden exit of arts hub chief may delay project,” South China Morning Post, January 8, 2011, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/article/735070/sudden-exit-arts-hub- chief-may-delay-project. 82 Ibid. 83 Alex Lo, “West Kowloon arts hub is turning from showcase into run-of-the-mill government- designed facility,” South China Morning Post, March 23, 2016, accessed June 8, 2017,

37

How did the dream job of setting up M+ from scratch, turn out to be a drawn- out bureaucratic nightmare? In line with Oscar Ho’s above remark, in this chapter I will find the answer to this question in the limited autonomy of art in Hong Kong in general, and the art professionals hired to set up M+ in particular. Discussing the history of the involvement of the government with art, I will show that the limited autonomy of art in Hong Kong’s particular modernity has to be understood against the backdrop of its colonial heritage, the primacy of economic development in its government policies, and its uncomfortable position vis-à-vis . An analysis of these ‘arts of the state’ thus necessitates an understanding of broader developments in Hong Kong, which will guide us from the city’s colonial rule, through it’s handover phase to the current setting of global city policies respectively.

2.1 A Society of Traders and Migrants (1842 – 1960) Business has always been the primary reason for the British occupation of Hong Kong since 1842. London’s reluctance to invest in the colony, combined with the political influence of trading house tycoons, resulted in pressure to keep the colony’s government small. A related laissez-faire attitude towards business and social welfare would characterise most of the 150 years of colonial rule. Hong Kong was not only a colony; it was also a society of migrants who recurrently entered the city to take up temporary domicile. The communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949 fundamentally changed this dynamic, as a new wave of Chinese migrants entered the territory, and this time they came to stay. By the end of World War II, the city’s population had risen to 900,000 and it has seen an increase of 1 million every 10 years since then.84 Many of these migrants had fled prosecution and oppression, and the prevailing ‘refugee mentality’ was to keep their head down, work hard and carve out a living. They had no problems with the colonial government as long as the government did not bother them. The combination of a ‘market mentality’ and ‘refugee mentality’ resulted in a utilitarian, pragmatic society. In this climate, art and culture were low on the agenda, and the government did not invest in an infrastructure to support its development until the 1960s. This is reflected in the early history of Hong Kong’s art institutions. From http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1929861/west-kowloon-arts-hub-turning- showcase-run-mill-government. 84 Gordon Mathews, Eric Ki-wai Ma and Tai-lok Lui, Hong Kong, China: Learning to belong to a Nation (London: Routledge, 2008), 23.

38 1869 on there was a museum as part of the City Hall building, but it had no connection whatsoever with the territory and was described in the 1930s as “a repository for odds and ends from every corner of the globe … a collection of Australian parrots, mineralogical specimens from Wales, old clocks, etc.”85 The demolition of the building in 1947 left the territory with no public cultural facility at all.86 However, the lack of a public institution did not mean that there were no exhibitions or there was no artistic practice, but these played out in elite private clubs, and private art institutes and associations developed by the city’s elite civil society.87

2.2 Building the Cultural Desert (1960 – 1997) The 1960s heralded the start of enormous changes in Hong Kong society. As Oscar Ho observes, Hong Kong’s baby boom generation came of age; the first generation without personal experiences with Mainland China, for whom Hong Kong was home.88 In this setting, civil society broadened, as reflected by disturbances and labour riots in 1966 and 1967. This instigated fear for further radicalisation under influence of China’s cultural revolution, threatening the stability of the colony. Reluctantly, the government started to invest in social projects. In order to differentiate the colony from communist China, the government also stimulated a specific sense of Hong Kong civic mindedness, and a distinct Hong Kong identity started to emerge in the 1970s.89 Meanwhile, the colonial administration channelled popular mobilisation through social movements, accommodating consultation and participation by inviting professionals and representatives of vested interest groups to join governmental committees.90 This ‘administrative absorption of politics’ through ‘consultative democracy’91 did not change much about the strong ties between the state and the economy. While the legal system in Hong Kong’s particular modernity obtained considerable autonomy, other structural domains were less clearly separated.

85 Eva Kit Wah Man, “A Museum of Hybridity: the History of the Display of Art in the Public Museum of Hong Kong and Its Implications for Cultural Identities,” in Issues of Contemporary Art and Aesthetics in Chinese Context (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2015), 79. 86 John M. Carroll, “Displaying the Past to serve the Present: Museums and Heritage Preservation in Post-Colonial Hong Kong?,” Twentieth-Century China 31, no. 1 (2005): 81. 87 Hong Kong Artists Volume 1, Urban Council (Hong Kong: , 1995), Exhibition catalog. 88 Amor et al., “Liminalities:” 40. 89 Kith Tsang, “The Intracable Problems in Hong Kong Contemporary Visual Arts,” in AICA, Hong Kong Art Review, (Hong Kong: AICA, 1999), 71; Carroll, “Displaying the Past,” 81; Mathews, Ma and Lui, “Hong Kong, China,” 34. 90 Mathews, Ma and Lui, “Hong Kong, China,” 34. 91 Ibid.

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The opening up of China to the capitalist world system in the late 1970s changed Hong Kong’s fortunes. Providing foreign capital, technology, and expertise, the territory soon established itself as service centre for China’s rapidly expanding economy.92 Another dramatic development was the 1984 Joint Declaration between the UK and China that stipulated that Hong Kong would return to Chinese rule in 1997. According to the so-called Basic Law – Hong Kong’s mini-constitution – the territory would be governed under a ‘one country, two systems’ construction, that upholds Hong Kong’s way of life including the rule of law and the freedom of speech until 2047. Apprehension about this return to China escalated after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Thousands of people moved to English speaking countries like Canada and Australia, only to return with overseas citizenships. Meanwhile, those who stayed behind were forced to reflect on what it means to be from Hong Kong. The next chapter will show that artists played an important role in such processes of identity formation in the shadow of the handover. These sweeping changes from 1960 onwards were mirrored in developments in art and culture. In 1962 a modest beginning was made when City Hall reopened its doors in a new harbour front location, housing the City Museum and Art Gallery on the top three floors. While a step up from the museum in the old City Hall, there was still little coherence in the programming. The title of the first exhibition – Hong Kong Art Today – organised by the museum’s first curator, John Warner, seemed promising enough, but subsequent exhibitions proved a mishmash.93 Meanwhile, arrangements to keep costs to a minimum reflected the colonial administration’s commercial attitude towards public art facilities. Operated by the government through the Urban Services Council, the venue was also open for bookings.94 Furthermore, some of the bigger shows of Western artists, such as the travelling exhibition Recent British Sculpture, were organised by the British Council.95 The 1970s implementation of large-scale investments in social welfare also had a positive impact on the arts. Arguing that Hong Kong was a culture-less place –

92 Ibid. 93 “Previous Exhibitions,” Leisure and Cultural Services Department, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/ce/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/artpedia06.html. To give an idea of the character of the venue, the opening year saw among others ‘Modern Sculptures of Barbara Hepworth’; ‘Looking at Birds by Eric Hosking’; ‘Round the World in 60 prints’; ‘Japanese Children’s Art’; ‘The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’; and ‘The Hong Kong Stamp Centenary Exhibition’. 94 Man, “Museum of Hybridity,” 75. 95 “Recent British Sculpture,” British Council, accessed June 8, 2017, http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/exhibitions/exhibition/recent-british-sculpture-1962.

40 or ‘cultural desert’ in popular parlance – that should become ‘cultured’ through the introduction of classical music, ballet and theatre, the Urban Council started to promote Western ‘high’ art.96 According to a 1997 evaluation, “the kind of culture which the government ‘nurtured’, if not planned, favoured a Western cultural and language orientation and aimed at an international but not local or experimental, perspective.”97 Remarkably, all effort was focused on the performing arts, while investments in the visual art infrastructure lagged behind, a bias that wouldn’t be addressed until the early 1990s.98 There seemed to be some progress when in 1975 the City Hall Museum and Art Gallery was split up into two new museums: the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Museum of History.99 At least now there was an institution with a clear identity, focusing on visual art. However, the new Hong Kong Museum of Art never lived up to its potential. Oscar Ho draws a direct comparison with developments in other Asian cities to explain the obstacles. Most of these institutions, (..) were designed and operated following models of the West, and were monitored, if not run directly by civil servants. The lack of trained professionals (..) resulted in the employment of nonprofessionals, (..) usually civil servants transferred from other governmental departments.100

Meanwhile, “artistic direction was dictated by boards or advisory committees of senior members of the community with ‘cultural taste’, frequently people in socially prestigious positions such as businessmen, collectors, academics, lawyers, and doctors.”101 A second challenge wouldn’t come to the fore until the late 1980s. In preparation of the relocation from City Hall to a new purpose built Tsim Sha Tsui venue, it became clear that the institution did not have a large enough collection. The government stepped up efforts, increasing the acquisition budget from 3 to 13 million HKD; still meagre for a museum building its own collection.102 The Museum’s

96 Vivienne Manchi Chow, “Chinese Elitism and Neoliberalism – Post-colonial Hong Kong Cultural Policy Development: A Case Study” (MA Thesis, The University of Hong Kong, 2012), 27-28. 97 Carolyn Cartier, “Culture and the City: Hong Kong 1997-2007,” The China Review 8, no.1 (2008): 63. 98 David Clarke, Art & Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996), 47-51. 99 Carroll, “Displaying the Past,” 81-82. 100 Oscar Ho, “In Search of Art,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 303-304. 101 Ibid. 102 Man, “Museum of Hybridity,” 72.

42 collection strategy mainly focused on Chinese antiquities and literati ink painting, reflecting the conservative taste of a Chinese elite that donated art works, and populated the museum’s advisory committees.103 Attention for ‘local’ art mainly focused on the still very ‘Chinese’ New Ink movement, while abundant local contemporary artistic endeavours were totally ignored. David Clarke summarises the prevailing sentiment, writing that [i]n Hong Kong, museums have shown more interest in pre-modern Chinese ink painting, ceramics or bronzes than in contemporary art. These objects have been utilized to construct displays embodying ideological narratives of continuous national culture (..), and the modern and contemporary has been marginalized because it is potentially disruptive of such atemporal cultural essentialism.104

The institution also struggled to facilitate a broader range of media. By employing a very narrow definition of art, and drawing rigid boundaries between different categories and media, it was only able to accommodate part of the art that was produced in the territory at that moment. East and West were kept strictly apart: works in media other than ink, such as oil or installation art, were placed in separate ‘Western art’ sections.105 Clarke thus argues: “Hong Kong is not constructed in the narrative of this museum display as a place with its own artistic identity, but presented as a site on which two other artistic traditions meet – and meet in polite, neighbourly coexistence.” The Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial, an art competition organised by the museum since 1975 and open to all Hong Kong artists, illustrates how unproductive this approach is. Initially, the competition employed a strict division between Chinese media (only ink) and Western media (all the rest, including video art, installation art, and painting). Local curators – the civil servants running the museum – then made an initial selection. As curator Tobias Berger observed, “sometimes this first round seems to eliminate the more exciting projects.”106 This was mirrored in complaints of international experts making the final selection about the limited choice of interesting works. In 1994, curator Achille Bonito Oliva thus even refused to award any prize in the ‘western media’ category.107 In the early 90s,

103 Clarke, Art & Place, 51. 104 David Clarke, Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 73. 105 Clarke, Art & Place, 16. 106 Tobias Berger, “Hong Kong SAR: Special Art Region,” Yishu. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, no. 4 (2005): 6. 107 Jack Lee, “Luis Chan and the “Hong Kong Art Today” Dispute,” in From Reality to Fantasy. The Art of Luis Chan, ed. Jack Lee (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2006), 134.

44 art excluded from the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial famously found a more understanding home in a controversial ‘salon de refusés’ in the privately run Fringe Club. According to Oscar Ho, this illustrates the problematic nature of the prime position of civil servants in Hong Kong’s art institutions, which for instance does not leave room for acknowledging Hong Kong’s more critical and political, exciting art production in the field of installation art: [t]he culture of the civil service promotes rules and order, values collective decision-making, does not tolerate ambiguity and opposes risk taking. Such a bureaucratic operational model is in fundamental opposition to artistic/creative projects, which demand experimentation, risk-taking and personal endeavour.108

A final worthwhile development is the establishment of the Arts Development Council (ADC) in 1995, a funding body that replaced the Council for the Performing Arts. In contrast to this earlier Council, which had a very narrow focus and only served an advisory role, the ADC is a democratically elected statutory funding body with administrative autonomy.109 It did not change the fact that the government, through the Urban Councils continued to have a monopoly on arts venues, programming and the lion’s share of the budget reserved for art and culture. But the establishment of the ADC did have a positive influence nonetheless, as we will see in Section 3.2. In summary, during this long formative period, there was no clear differentiation between the government and the art system, as civil servants ran the budding art institutions. Government policy consistently devalued visual art in favour of the performing arts. According to Terence Yuen, “[t]his meant that art and culture were simply regarded as a ploy for providing leisure activities and entertainment to the public.” 110 Chin suggests that this was a deliberate tactic of the colonial government, which saw art’s subversive potential as a possible threat and did not want to stimulate critical thinking.111 In the 1994 exhibition Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity, organised at the privately run Hong Kong Arts Centre, curators Oscar Ho and

108 Oscar Ho, “Under the Shadow. Problems in Museum Development in Asia,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making, ed. Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 189. 109 Terence Yuen, “A Decade’s Long March: Reform of Institutional Framework on Culture and the Arts,” in A Decade of Arts Development in Hong Kong, ed. Stephen Lam (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2006), 8. 110 Yuen, “Decade’s Long March,” 13. 111 Chin Wan, 香港有文化——香港的文化政策（上卷）(Hong Kong: Arcadia Press, 2008), 48, quoted in Chow, “Chinese Elitism,” 4-5.

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Matthew Turner similarly tried to show “how the colonial administration and local elite represented images of modernity carefully tailored to omit political representation.”112 The precedence of the display of Chinese and Western practices over reflections on and development of Hong Kong art itself also has to be understood against the background of such an aversion towards critical reflexivity. According to Oscar Ho, “[d]uring the 1960s there was a lot of local discussion about promoting arts education, but the colonial government decided that they would promote design instead, because design is about the practical use of creativity.”113 Ho concludes that as a result, from the earliest stages, art was subject to a utilitarian view of culture.

2.3 Asia’s Basic City (1997 – now) When the Brits left Hong Kong in 1997, the territory became a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The handover coincided with the start of the Asian financial crisis, which revealed the risks of the territory’s economic dependence on real estate and financial services. In sync with worldwide entrepreneurial government strategies, Hong Kong repositioned itself with marketing campaigns like ‘Brand Hong Kong’ and ‘Asia’s World City’, aimed to attract foreign head offices, professional talent, and tourists.114 This contributed to a generic type of cosmopolitanism that copies successful strategies and urban projects from other places in the world, but without the social practices.115 Meanwhile, the relationship between Hong Kong’s people and their new sovereign has never been easy and demonstrations have been a constant; most radically during the three month ‘Umbrella protests’ of late 2014, triggered by inadequate proposals for universal suffrage. Soaring housing prices, immense inequality, limited social mobility, and the persistent feeling that infringes on the city’s autonomy account to an overall bleak outlook for the young ‘post 1980s’ generation.

112 Matthew Turner, “Design Exhibitions without Design Promotion” (paper presented at M+ Matters Symposium, M+, Hong Kong, December 2-3, 2012), accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.mplusmatters.hk/asiandesign/paper_topic11.php. 113 John Millichap, “The Problem with Politics: An Interview with Oscar Ho,” Yishu. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, no. 4 (2005): 11. 114 David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989); Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, “An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong’s Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter)Urban Competition,” Urban Studies, 37, no. 12 (2000). 115 Stephen Yiu-wai Chu, “Brand Hong Kong: Asia’s World City as Method?,” in Hybrid Hong Kong, ed. Chan Kwok-bun (New York: Routledge).

46 As for the art ecology, the dire situation at the end of the 1990s was clearly summarised by artist Kith Tsang: [t]he Hong Kong Museum of Art, (..) has never actively supported local visual arts. They have no clear policy on the development, promotion and collection of art. (..) In addition Hong Kong doesn’t have a public space for the discussion of art. (..) There are no visual art schools to train new artists in a systematical way. The system of art galleries is immature. The development of art is abnormal: there are only artists (nearly all of them part-timers) with nobody to curate, criticize, publish and research.116

Terence Yuen added that “[t]he existing cultural institutional framework (..) is a product of accidental accumulation of historical events, devoid of any rationalised policy thinking or cultural vision.”117 In the first years after the handover a lot seemed to be changing: several museums were opened, the Culture and Heritage Commission (CHC) was appointed, and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) replaced the Urban Council as prime caretaker of cultural institutions. Unfortunately a lot stayed the same as well. In 2003, the CHC supplied the government with a long list of recommendations, but the most crucial recommendation – more autonomy for art institutions – was ignored.118 In 2005 the International Association of Theatre Critics concluded that “the repeating consultations of arts policy reform over the last ten years result[ed] only in [a] ‘long march without progress’.”119 In the same publication, Terence Yuen observes many continued problems, including an uneven distribution of public resources; obstacles to grassroots initiatives as a result of the government domination in arts; and conservative and monotonous venue and resource management.120 These characteristics result from an arts policy based on risk aversion instead of an artistic and cultural long-term vision. It is also a policy that concerns itself with the ‘hardware’, such as top-down designed museums, while forgetting the ‘software’, the much needed bottom-up initiatives, audience building and arts education that drives the growth of a cultural scene. The history of the Oil Village illustrates how a lack of vision holds back bottom-up initiatives. One of the triggers for this Art Village was the

116 Tsang, “Intracable Problems,” 74. 117 Yuen, “Decade’s Long March,” 10. 118 Ibid., 11-12. 119 Stephen Lam, Editor’s Note in A Decade of Arts Development in Hong Kong, ed. Stephen Lam (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2006), 5. 120 Yuen, “Decade’s Long March,” 9.

47 establishment of the ADC, which stimulated the emergence of various art collectives and artist-run art spaces in the late 90s. In 1998, several groups obtained temporary leases, at an adjusted rate, for the former government depot at Oil Street in North Point. The new occupants quickly forged relationships with the neighbourhood. As David Clarke observes, “almost by accident a geographically focused alternative cultural scene developed of a kind never before seen in Hong Kong.”121 It was an eye- opener for a government that until then had followed a hardware-focused approach of purpose-built prestige venues. However, instead of nurturing this initiative, within two years the government evicted the artist groups to make room for real estate developments. Ironically, since 2013 the very same Oil Street venue hosts a government project, where bureaucrats rather unsuccessfully attempt to recreate what organically emerged at the turn of the century. The saga of the Kai Tak campus of the Academy for Visual Arts, the long awaited tertiary arts education institution established in 2006 as part of Baptist University, similarly illustrates that the government has a hard time to think in other terms than financial gains about the necessary real estate for art initiatives, thus keeping the budding arts ecology dangling in an ever-precarious situation. While the government decision that the institution should pay market rent was upturned when students protested, the future of the campus remains uncertain.122 By the mid-2000s it was abundantly clear that the numerous critical advisory committees and consultation papers had not resulted in significant transformations. Meanwhile, as Terence Yuen pessimistically observed, “the reform agenda on culture and the arts that began in the 90s abruptly ceased”.123 This coincided with a shifting emphasis towards the economic contribution of culture through the ‘creative industries’. This concept had been introduced from abroad in the late 1990s as a way to diversify Hong Kong’s stagnating economy. As a deus ex machina, it helped civil servants to avoid difficult questions regarding the autonomy of art, and focus on what they knew best: stimulating the economy. And for lack of an alternative, the arts sector went along with the new utilitarian rhetoric.124 In hindsight, this affirmation of

121 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 98. 122 Vivienne Chow, “The warrior of the arts talks strategy,” South China Morning Post, January 7, 2013, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1121555/warrior-arts- talks-strategy. 123 Yuen, “Decade’s Long March,” 12. 124 Eddy Chan, “From “Creative Industries” to “Cultural and Creative Industries”,” in Lam, Decade of Arts Development, 56-69.

48 an expedient view of culture, when a more critical, inquisitive art practice was only just starting to take root, has hurt the cause of the art scene. As a result popular culture such as design and film became the focal point while visual art was gradually pushed aside.125 Creative industries, as a travelled concept, were never an easy fit for Hong Kong. Several Chinese translations were used interchangeably, indicating that the government did not have a clear concept, while clouding public perception.126 More problematic was the fact that Hong Kong’s engagement with creative industries did not target the nurturing of a holistic, fertile art and culture production climate. Instead, it was preoccupied with short-term financial gains, while protecting vested interests and the investment climate. Telling examples are easy to find: the industrial buildings revitalisation policy, which ended up displacing artists in favour of retail, dining and service industries, for instance in Fo Tan or Wong Chuk Hang; 127 or the redevelopment of the Police Married Quarters (PMQ), which became another shopping mall renting out space to international brands instead of the promised ‘creative industries landmark’, a hub for small creative enterprises and indie brands. In this overall cultural climate, it is hardly surprising that the rigmarole surrounding Hong Kong’s most anticipated cultural venture, the West Kowloon Cultural District, has not been positive either. Suggested to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council by the Tourism Board in 1998, this project results from an entrepreneurial government strategy to build cultural venues in the hope to create a ‘Bilbao effect’. From the start, a museum was meant to be part of the district. Next to various proposals from the general public, unsurprisingly, influential members of the local Chinese elite advocated a museum for Chinese ink art.128 The eventual concept of M+ envisioned an institution for visual culture beyond the existing concept of a museum, built on four pillars tailored to Hong Kong’s context: design, moving image, popular

125 Ibid., 65. 126 Ibid., 64. 127 Legislative Council, “LCQ4: Impact of industrial building revitalisation measures on cultural, creative and arts workers,” March 16, 2016, accessed October 11, 2016, http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201603/16/P201603160591.htm. 128 Museums Advisory Group - Consultative Committee on the Core Arts and Cultural Facilities of the West Kowloon Cultural District, “The Report to the Consultative Committee,” November 23, 2006, accessed June 9, 2017, http://enews.westkowloon.hk/filemanager/en/share/doc/report/MAG_Report.pdf, Annex, 24.

50 culture, and visual art.129 The latter includes ink art, a fact that is always specifically mentioned, one can imagine, to keep the influential Chinese elite happy. Echoing the advice of earlier committees, the government was urged multiple times that M+ best “would be managed and operated with new modes of governance with institutional autonomy outside the Government structure” in order to bring it “into line with international practices.”130 When, remarkably, this time around the suggestion was heeded, the cultural sector welcomed this news as an unprecedented breakthrough.131 However, the staff of the existing civil servant run museums were not so happy, arguing against the need for another museum. The prestigious nature of M+ combined with the lack of local curators with experience running such a huge project, led to the hiring of an international curatorial team, thus improving the chances of eventual autonomy significantly. It did however also cause bad blood in the local Hong Kong arts community, aggravated by the institution’s acceptance of Uli Sigg’s collection of Mainland Chinese contemporary art at a cost of HKD 177 million, or 17 per cent of the acquisition budget of HKD 1 billion at that time.132 Clearly, this acquisition in the earliest stages shifted the focus of the collection to Mainland Chinese art; something that was understandably sensitive in Hong Kong. Positive as this move towards autonomy seemed, the ties between the government and the WKCDA remain strong, often obstructing day-to-day operations.133 The inherent conflicts are illustrated by pro-Beijing lawmaker Chan Kam-lam who argued “that works that are indecent, vulgar, political and insulting are not works of art (...) We do not intend any political interference. But I hope [West Kowloon] will always remember that art is art. Culture is culture."134 The departures at the top of both the museum and the WKCDA that I alluded to at the start of this chapter seem to suggest that struggles over the autonomy of M+ are here to stay. The museum’s discretion in issues pertaining to Mainland China seems to be especially doubtful. While the organisational structure of M+ – autonomous, led by international

129 Ibid. 130 Consultative Committee on the Core Arts and Cultural Facilities of the West Kowloon Cultural District, “Recommendation Report”, June 2007, accessed June 9, 2017, http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr04- 05/english/hc/sub_com/hs02/papers/hs020912wkcd-398-e.pdf, 14. 131 Ho, “Under the Shadow,” 188. 132 Joyce Lau, “Hong Kong gains collection of contemporary Chinese art,” The New York Times, June 12, 2012, accessed May &, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/arts/13iht-hong13.html. 133 Ibid. 134 Vivienne Chow, “Artists worry government will try to control culture at new M+ museum,” South China Morning Post, April 24, 2013, accessed June 9, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1221681/artists-worry-government-will-try-control-culture-new-m-museum.

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curators, etc. – thus fits the international idea of how a museum should be organised, its functioning is still obstructed by the local reality: far-reaching interference from government administrators. Oscar Ho summarises the problems succinctly: Conceptually, M+ is too unconventional for Hong Kong’s current civil servant culture, too complex for the decision-makers unfamiliar with arts and culture, and too big for the existing cultural framework. The import of overseas support is, thus, an inevitable consequence. Despite efforts to build an institution that reflects local cultural experiences, and to establish a language to articulate local Hong Kong culture, the cracks in the existing infrastructure, the imbalance of power between the bureaucracy and non-government cultural workers and, most significantly, the continuing prevalence of the colonial mind-set, make it difficult to shape and establish the distinctive vision for M+.135

For years now, Hong Kong has been a place where many things seem (about) to happen, and a feeling of promise has been filling the air. Will Hong Kong deliver? Artist Lam Tung-pang has his doubts, remarking that it might be better if M+ is never finished; it will attract people from around the world, but it will only be a disappointment.136 Another local artist, Warren Leung Chi Wo suggests that Hong Kong mainly looks promising from the outside. He often feels a disconnect between foreign art professionals that enthusiastically arrive in Hong Kong and wary local artists and professionals that have seen it all before.137 The growing commercial sector does not help, as it diminishes the urgency for the government to take responsibility for art and culture. During a conference in 2016, Tobias Berger summarised the governments’ attitude as follows: “why would we build public institutions when Gagosian does it for free and has more space?”138 Meanwhile the public, unaccustomed to museums and art in non-commercial settings, continues to pay the price.

2.4 Conclusion Throughout this chapter, the problematic nature of government initiatives regarding art in Hong Kong in general, and of the resulting art infrastructure in particular, have

135 Ho “Under the Shadow,” 189. 136 David Clarke, Warren Leung Chi Wo, and Lam Tung-pang, audio file, 1:06:47, recording of conversation on Hong Kong Art on March 20, 2013, accessed June 17, 2017, http://finearts.hku.hk/hkaa/d/interview_159.mp3. 137 Ibid. 138 Tobias Berger, “Let’s Talk about Space,” video, 43:12, of a lecture presented at the Para Site 2016 International Conference on June 23, 2016, accessed June 9, 2017, http://www.para- site.org.hk/en/conference/20-years-of-para-site-2016-international-conference-and-workshops-for- emerging-professionals.

53 become abundantly clear. As a result of the dominant role of civil servants in the city’s art institutions and the limited influence of independent art professionals, the autonomy of the art field in Hong Kong’s particular modernity is restricted. This has stifled artists’ development, has made formal institutions irresponsive to the many local initiatives, and has undermined art’s critical and reflexive potential. This limited autonomy seems to be a consequence of the perceived need to control Hong Kong society in order to maintain the existing political hegemony and related vested interests. Chin Wan-kan and Yun Siu-wai summarise the causes of this situation clearly when they state that [during Hong Kong’s] colonial period, the British administration was unwilling to cultivate a cultural mainstream for fear that it would threaten the position of the government. As a consequence, a divide-and-conquer strategy characterized the allocation of cultural space and art funding in post-1960s Hong Kong. This approach was intended to preclude the formation of a mainstream ideology that could challenge the authority of the colonial government.139

This is not to say that nothing has changed. Before the handover, the colonial government’s art policies were guided by the aim to elevate the ‘uncultured’ masses. In response, state institutions focused on the performing arts and their entertainment and leisure functions. After the handover, the Special Administrative Region (SAR) government initiatives were refocused through the rhetoric of the creative industries. Art was conflated with a general idea of creativity, and it was pushed into the economic domain where it has stayed ever since, thus again undermining its critical and reflexive potential. This was rather convenient for the government, because it enabled them to evade the difficult questions and policy reforms that the cultural sector was demanding. While things have thus certainly changed, as far as the autonomy of art goes, outcomes have been remarkably similar. The short period between the establishment of the ADC in 1995 and the introduction of the concept of creative industries in the early 2000s did present an opportunity for something different. Advisory committees and their reports clearly identified the core problems of the existing institutional framework. However, to the dismay of the art world, the prescribed medication – increased autonomy – was never administered. The government, by way of the LCSD, kept its monopoly on venues,

139 Chin Wan-kan and Yun Siu-wai, “The predicament of competition for cultural resources among Hong Kong art troupes,” Leap, The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China 20 (2013), accessed May 7, 2017, http://www.leapleapleap.com/2013/05/the-predicament-of-competition-for- cultural-resources-among-hong-kong-art-troupes/.

54 programming, as well as on the majority of resource allocation, thereby stifling any development in the art scene, while at the same time not succeeding in building an audience. When it was decided that M+ would become relatively autonomous from the government, the Hong Kong art scene was carefully optimistic. But the past ten years have shown that it is not that easy to change an administration that fears the critical and reflexive role of art that might come with increased autonomy. By now, only downright optimists will still believe in the potential for change.

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3. Heung Geung Yan

The previous chapter paints a bleak picture of the institutional development of art in Hong Kong, showing how state and elite control have limited the autonomy of art institutions, while failing to provide a fertile setting for art production, or to nurture a broad understanding of art in the popular imagination. This chapter seeks to explore the consequences of this institutional setting for the critical and reflexive role of art. It does so through a discussion of the contribution of art to critical reflections on a Hong Kong identity, one of the territory’s crucial social issues of the last decades. As we have seen, the articulation of a Hong Kong identity only became of interest to the colonial government in the 1960s. With ambiguous relationships to both Britain and China, standard strategies to frame identity through national or ethnic narratives were hardly viable. Tensions grew further after the , resulting in the rise of ‘localism’ as a political movement. Lacking a separate nationality, the term Heung Geung Yan, or Hong Kong people, helped to emphasise an identity apart from China. In this loaded context, did art participate meaningfully in exploring what it means to be from Hong Kong? I address this question by analysing three moments in which art plays a role in the articulation of a certain Hong Kongness. First, I start with a discussion of Hong Kong’s modernist era between the late 1950s and 1960s, when Chinese artists sought to modernise Chinese ink painting in reference to developments in Western art, such as experiments with abstraction in the United States.140 Second, I turn my attention to the artistic production during the pre-handover years, characterised by a diversity of bottom-up art initiatives. Third, I take a look at the ‘globalised contemporary art world system’, in which we find ourselves today. In this setting, market players strategically package the identity of emerging art scenes like Hong Kong for easy consumption, as exemplified by Hong Kong Eye. Comparing these three moments, in the last section, I conclude that each episode touches on discussions about identity, but that there are striking differences in the ‘agents’ that articulate, and in their aims, their means, and the effects of their actions.

140 Chang Tsong-Zung, “The Full Remainder: Art from Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong Eye. Contemporary Hong Kong Art, ed. Eva Vanzella (Turin: Skira, 2012), exhibition catalog, 15; David Clarke, “Revolutions in Vision: Chinese Art and the Experience of Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 2008), 289-290.

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3.1 Hong Kong Modernism The emergence of the New Ink Movement in the 1960s is generally regarded as the birth of modern art in Hong Kong. Artists associated with this movement are held in high esteem. Fusing traditional Chinese and Western modernist narratives, they are presented as the first artists that developed a distinct Hong Kong style. With the Taiwanese Fifth Moon Group, the New Ink Movement is also credited for “keeping the flame of Chinese modernity alive”141 at a time when free art production was no longer possible in Maoist China.142 David Clarke thus argues that [t]hese two cities [Taipei and Hong Kong], existing outside the People’s Republic and both in their own ways markedly open to global economic, cultural and information flows, are (..) good examples of how Chinese artistic modernity grew from the margins rather than from the centre.143

In light of these bold claims, the traces of the New Ink Movement are surprisingly meagre – both in terms of theorisation and further development of experimental ink art in Hong Kong in later decades. I argue here that this has everything to do with Hong Kong’s art infrastructure, and with political reasons to present the New Ink Movement as expression of Hong Kong’s identity. The New Ink Movement emerged in a setting in which artists either worked in Chinese styles with brush and ink on paper or in Western styles and mediums such as oil and watercolours, and these two worlds rarely mixed. Without an art infrastructure, artists who generally also worked full-time jobs took on students privately. Their work was shown at exhibitions organised by private patrons, often at ‘clubs’ dominated by the British elite that focused on Western styles.144 In the absence of ‘official’ places to show their work, artists organised exhibitions themselves in spaces like libraries and churches.145 Since the late 1920s, these artist-driven efforts also resulted in a variety of associations.146 The dynamics in this art scene would

141 Clarke, “Revolutions in Vision,” 275. 142 Eva Kit Wah Man, “Metaphysics, Corporeality and Visuality: a Developmental and Comparative Review of the Discourse on Chinese Ink Painting,” in Man, Issues, 38. 143 Clarke, “Revolutions in Vision,” 275. 144 Anthony Yung, “Luis Chan: A Strange Little Island,” Leap. The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China 11 (2011), accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.leapleapleap.com/2011/11/luis- chan-a-strange-little-island/. 145 Man, “Museum of Hybridity,” 74. 146 See “Chronology of Hong Kong Art Development,” in Hong Kong Artists: Volume I, Urban Council (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum, of Art, 1995), 10-33 for a full overview of the historical development of art groups and institutions in Hong Kong.

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transform dramatically under influence of the large-scale immigration of Chinese refugees after 1949. These included well-off industrialists, who contributed to the importance of the Chinese elite in Hong Kong and to a growing attention for Non-Western art. At the same time, the massive influx presented colonial government with the challenge to accommodate ideas about a Hong Kong identity that was at once Chinese, but also distinct from Maoist China. In this context the City Museum and Art Gallery, which opened in 1962, became an important platform for a new home-grown experimental Chinese ink art. Meanwhile the prominence of Western style art declined.147 This shift is illustrated by heated discussions in the run-up to Hong Kong Art Today, the opening exhibition of this new art institution. Two artists, Luis Chan and Lui Shou-kwan, help to illustrate the changing mentality. According to Anthony Yung, Luis Chan was regarded as a Western painter of Chinese ethnicity. 148 He had been successful in the 1930s, becoming a popular artist in colonial elite circles.149 Working in watercolours and oil, self-taught Chan followed a correspondence course at the Press Art School in London and gleaned most of his knowledge from international art magazines.150 Lui Shou-kwan was the son of a scholar-painter, who came to Hong Kong from in 1948. His medium was shuimo, Chinese ink and wash painting, traditionally the terrain of the scholar gentlemen called wen-ren (literati). Just like Chan, Lui did not receive a professional art training. This was quite customary at the time in China, as painting was generally regarded more as an intellectual pastime than a career. In keeping with tradition, he started out copying acclaimed masters to refine his skills. Later he developed a new style, a more abstract synthesis of Eastern and Western elements, with self-expression as its main aim.151 This was supported by regular contacts with fellow overseas Chinese artists like Zao Wou-ki in Paris and Taiwanese Liu Guo-song, who in a similar experimental way were also stretching the boundaries of Chinese ink as a medium. Lui’s later abstract work culminated in the Zen paintings of the 1960s and 70s. These were inspired by abstract expressionism,

147 Eva Kit Wah Man, “The Notion of “Orientalism” in the Modernization Movement of Chinese Painting of Hong Kong Artists in 1960s: The Case of Hon Chi-Fun,” in Man, Issues, 59; Pedith Chan, “Ink Art in Hong Kong: an Exploration of the Floating Identity,” Leap. The International Art Magazine of Contemporary China 41 (2016): 169. 148 Yung, “Luis Chan.” 149 Eva Kit Wah Man, “Experimental Painting and Painting Theories in Colonial Hong Kong (1940- 1980): Reflections on Cultural Identity,” in Man, Issues, 50. 150 David Clarke Hong Kong Art, 19. 151 Petra Hinterthür, Modern Art in Hong Kong, (Hong Kong: Myer Publishing, 1985), 61.

61 visible in the gestural brush strokes and the colour palette of red, white and black.152 According to David Clarke: “Lu[i] combined prominent calligraphic ink strokes that self-consciously invoke the Chinese brush heritage with allusions to the work of contemporary Western artists such as Adolph Gottlieb and Pierre Soulages (..).”153 Inadvertently, Chan and Lui became symbols for clashing opinions about art that came to the fore through the opening exhibition at City Hall in 1962. The curator of the new venue, John Warner, selected Lui for this exhibition but not Chan, the darling of the pre-war British elite. Luis Chan called Warner out in an open letter in a local newspaper. Warner retorted that he intended to show art that was current. In true Greenbergian style, he meant abstract art, and not “[w]orks of aged old styles, stalemate techniques, and ignoble plagiarism.”154 Luis Chan would be rehabilitated a decade later, after a frantic search for his identity as a painter. Meanwhile, Lui Shou- kwan emerged as a truly worthwhile artist. In hindsight, Warner’s judgement seems to be guided by Western ideas about the progress of art relating to the idea of ‘universal temporality’ that I discussed in section 1.2. His dismissal of Luis Chan’s work as derivative resembles similar responses to the work of Bhupen Khakhar. At the same time, Warner’s Western orientalist eye recognised ink art as ‘overtly and comfortably Chinese’ and his familiarity with the visual language of Western art easily translated into appreciation for the connections between experimental ink art and art in the West; the Rorschach test continues. Questionable as these positions might be from a contemporary sensitivity to multiple modernities, they were based on judgements that originated within the art field. These choices did however happily fit in with attitudes outside of the realm of art itself, of both Chinese elites and a colonial government on the hunt for acceptable identifications. The New Ink Movement on the one hand built on Chinese traditions, but on the other hand modernised these through Western influences, thus making it ‘differently Chinese’. According to Andrews and Shen the New Ink artists did not set out to articulate a Hong Kong identity, and they explicitly aligned themselves with Asian philosophy.155 But, as David Clarke argues,

152 Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth -Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 192-194. 153 Clarke, “Revolutions in Vision,” 289-290. 154 Jack Lee, “Luis Chan,” 138. 155 Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 236.

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the concern that artists showed for combining the Chinese and the Western (and the apolitical way in which they did so) made it quite a suitable visual culture for a colonial government to promote. (..) An image of Hong Kong as a place where ‘East meets West’ was the perfect veil for the realities of colonial life.156

The idea that the New Ink Movement represents the first expression of the Hong Kong identity thus became a cornerstone in the story that Hong Kong tells about itself. City Hall, and its successor the Hong Kong Museum of Art, would keep pushing the work of Lui Shou-kwan, and a whole generation of artists influenced by him such as Wucius Wong and Irene Chou, as the best of Hong Kong art and as the style that epitomises the territory. This top-down identification of the New Ink Movement as Hong Kong’s identity has not been very helpful for critical reflection on this identity. Instead, the annexation of this art and its meaning closed it off for new interpretations. The remarkable fact that the vast majority of the work of Lui Shou-kwan is in the hands of two owners – the Hong Kong Museum of Art and a private collector – does not create a favourable context for a critical discourse either. Critical reflexivity is further undermined by the fact that the New Ink Movement as product of modernity is built upon a binary idea of East and West. Thus, for David Clarke, artists like Wucius Wong essentialise Chinese and Western cultures: “Their project of modernisation became problematic because they were never willing to critique the image they had of that culture, instead merely juxtaposing signifiers of the Western and modern to those of Chineseness.”157 Despite this shortcoming, this binary view would become strongly institutionalised in Hong Kong’s art field, as the New Ink artists were heavily involved in the City Hall project as advisors and curators.158 They would also guide the constitution of a new academic programme that would eventually evolve into the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.159 In recent years, the art market as creator of narratives on this movement did not support critical reflexivity either. Because of these reasons, a static narrative has arisen that – as I will show in the next section – would not provide much inspiration when younger generations who were born in Hong Kong started to reflect on Hong Kong’s identity in the run-up to the handover of the territory to China.

156 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 36-37. 157 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 34; Clarke, “Revolutions in Vision,” 290. 158 Man, “Experimental Painting,” 53. 159 Andrews and Kuiyi, Art of Modern China, 232-234.

64 Obviously, this is not a judgement of the artistic qualities of the New Ink Movement as such. But since the New Ink Movement has been uncritically and purposefully burdened with the full weight of the identity of Hong Kong, it is not only artistic expression. While the initial appreciation for New Ink might have originated within the arts, its framing as the epitome of Hong Kong identity has been very much top-down and government-led and has been translated in practices that do not support critical reflection on what it means to be from Hong Kong. It is striking and worrying at the same time, that at least in the international literature, so far no questions are asked about these politics of the reception and framing of the New Ink Movement. What is urgently needed then is not only an analysis of the New Ink Movement itself, but also of the ways in which this has been politically framed.

3.2 Towards the Handover According to Oscar Ho the “unusually energetic period in both art making and art criticism” after the mid-1980s when a new generation of artists emerged, resulted in the consolidation of contemporary art in Hong Kong.160 This period featured a diversity of artists, working in various styles and mediums. Due to limited support, the work of many pioneers in the first part of this period did not always receive the attention it deserved. Over the years, art production was increasingly fuelled by a looming common concern: who are we? This question was obviously bound up with anxiety about Hong Kong’s impending return to China; an anxiety that intensified after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The resulting work was unmistakeably political, socially engaged, but not overtly activist. The uncertainty of the years between the announcement in 1984 and the actual handover in 1997 resulted in a peculiar perception of time, often imaginatively depicted by artists and filmmakers. In Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), for instance, “[t]ime is elastic (..). Wong’s characters almost never fully exist in the present moment. Some part of them is forever looking forward or backward, either anticipating or remembering. Often, paradoxically, both at once.”161 In this suspended setting, the question what it means to be from Hong Kong became an urgent theme in artistic practices.

160 Oscar Ho, “Shortlist Hong Kong,” Asia Art Archive, undated, accessed June 8, 2017, http://www.aaa.org.hk/en/resources/bibliographies/shortlist-hong-kong. 161 Mike D’Angelo, “How Wong Kar-Wai turned 22 seconds into an eternity,” The Dissolve, October 16, 2013, accessed June 17, 2017, https://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/221-how-wong- kar-wai-turned-22-seconds-into-an-eternit/.

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The character of art production in the latter part of this period is well illustrated by a work of Leung Chi Wo, Dream of a Path. Leung is one of the founders of Para Site, an artist run alternative art space that started out in a former shop house in the peripheral neighbourhood of Kennedy Town. Dream of a Path was part of the art space’s inaugural show Relic/Image in January 1996, a site-specific installation by Kith Tsang, Patrick Lee and Leung Chi Wo. As part of Leung’s contribution he engraved Cantonese characters into the concrete floor of the exhibition space, eternalising the names and prices of local dishes on the menu of a 1960s dai pai dong, the typical Hong Kong street food stall.162 Several characteristics of this work and its context are typical for art of this period. The first characteristic relates to Leung’s choice of medium: site-specific installation art. 163 There are various reasons behind this choice. To start with, compared to the very Chinese medium of ink art, installation art was perceived as a relatively neutral medium.164 High real estate prices also formed an obstacle to organise studio- and storage space, making site-specific artworks an obvious choice.165 Furthermore, in absence of a commercial market, Hong Kong artists also lacked incentives to produce commoditised artworks. The second characteristic, typical for art in this period, is the centrality of identity in Dream of a Path. As part of the artwork, Leung made oil rubbings of the engravings in the floor, a tradition usually reserved for memorials and relics. He thereby deliberately employed elite practices to depict the lived experience of common people. Leung thus elevated Hong Kong’s recent collective memory, and juxtaposed it with official written history with its Chinese nationalist flavour that characterised the displays and rhetoric of Hong Kong’s state museums at that time.166 This attention for the local and the vernacular instead of the ‘high’ culture of either the West or China was emblematic for art of this period. The importance in Leung’s work of language is equally typical for art works of that time, and this was of course the local Cantonese language and not Mandarin Chinese.167

162 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 87-90. 163 Cartier, “Culture and the City,” 73; Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 70-74; Clarke, “Revolutions in Vision,” 293; Ho, “Shortlist Hong Kong Art.” 164 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 71-72. 165 Tsang, “Intracable Problems,” 70. 166 Carroll, “Displaying the Past.” 167 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, 87-90.

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The third characteristic is that Relic/Image took place in an artist-run space in a less developed neighbourhood. This is a logical continuation of earlier periods, when artists united and organised their own shows. Such initial initiatives received a considerable boost when the creation of the ADC in 1995 created the possibility for artists groups to apply for funding. While grants were small and short-term in nature, this led to a burst of activities by collectives like Videotage, 1a space, and Artist Commune. The creation of the ADC can therefore be seen as a watershed moment in the history of Hong Kong art. Kith Tsang, one of the other founders of Para Site, captures the prevailing mood: “My friends and I used the subsidy to try to solve the five ‘deficiencies’ of Hong Kong’s art institutions: studio and exhibition space, curatorship, publication, criticism and research.”168 With the limited recognition and reassurance that the ADC offered, artists took it upon themselves to be a whole art ecosystem at once. As a consequence of these characteristics, the history of art in this period is probably better presented as a history of exhibitions; since artworks were often created for specific locations and in conjunction with works of other artists, they were part of a larger discourse. When regarded as individual works of art many layers of meaning are therefore lost. The habit to dispose of artworks after exhibitions obstructs the retelling of this period, as the M+ team experienced when looking for works to add to the collection. 169 While there has been a wealth of art production, the works itself have all but disappeared. Overall, this period marks the consolidation of a conceptual notion of art, which contrasts with the earlier emphasis on art production based on formal characteristics. Conceptual art proved to be a highly suitable vehicle for bottom-up critical reflection on the identity of Hong Kong, thus contributing to what Chantal Mouffe terms ‘the construction of new subjectivities’.170 Lam Tung-pang suggests that the artistic attention triggered a much broader discussion about identity in Hong Kong in subsequent years, implying that art clearly played a social role.171 Similarly, Leung Chi Wo suggests that artists feel that they contributed to the discussion of both

168 Tsang, “Intracable Problems,” 74. 169 David Clarke, Warren Leung Chi Wo, and Lam Tung-pang, audio file, 1:06:47, recording of conversation on Hong Kong Art on March 20, 2013. 170 Mouffe, “Artistic Activism.” 171 David Clarke, Warren Leung Chi Wo, and Lam Tung-pang, audio file, 1:06:47, recording of conversation on Hong Kong Art on March 20, 2013.

70 the history and the future of Hong Kong.172 However, unfortunately, the idea of art as a conceptual discursive activity independent of medium which accommodated this social role remained rather alien, and to the present day large parts of the population associate art with painting, or possibly sculpture.173 Indirectly, this is illustrated by a review of Kith Tsang’s 1997 Para Site show: When compared to those of the other visual artists in Hong Kong, Tsang’s works are crude, primitive, plain, cheap and adaptive in terms of craftsmanship, materials employed and overall layout. These are exactly what endow his works with a strong sense of daily life.174

Apparently, it was still necessary to explain that conceptual art might have to be judged by other than formalistic criteria. Art education hadn’t quite caught up with these developments and ideas either. Lam Tung-pang, who graduated in 2002 from Chinese University, the sole tertiary art education provider at the time, explains: “when I got to London [for an MFA at Central Saint Martins], I learned that art is not only about aesthetics or visual elements. It is more engaged with social issues of the time.”175 Not coincidentally, Leung Chi Wo intimates that he couldn’t really conceive of being an artist after graduating in the early 1990s; only after a residency in Europe did the possibility of becoming an artist occur to him in the full extent of its meaning.176 This is probably understandable, in view of the fact that the decision to become an artist “is to embrace failure in terms of the rewards of Hong Kong”, as an art critic wrote in 1999.177 In a money- and career-oriented society, the incentives to become an artist and play a social role are limited. The pre-handover critical and reflexive art scene emerged in relative isolation from both Hong Kong elite and government. Admittedly, initiatives were supported by ADC government funding, but the government-led art institutions were strikingly unreceptive for the art that was produced. There is no mention, for instance, of these

172 Ibid. 173 Frank Vigneron, “Two Competing Habitus among Hong Kong Art Practitioners,” Visual Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2013). 174 Edwin K. Lai, “Indigenous Culture, History and Memories, Time: Reflections on the Two Inaugural Exhibitions at Para Site,” review of exhibition Hello! Hong Kong - Part 7, May 21 – Jun 20, 1997, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.para-site.org.hk/en/exhibitions/hello-hong-kong-part-7. 175 Oscar Ho, Frank Vigneron, Lam Tung-pang, Samson Young and Dean Chan, “Undoing Nationalism, Fabricating Transnationalism,” Third Text 28, no. 1 (2014): 97. 176 Warren Leung Chi Wo, in a discussion with the author, November 2012, Hong Kong. 177 Eric Otto Wear, “No Place is Home: Outmanoeuvring Cultural/Racial Identity in Hong Kong,” in AICA, Hong Kong Art Review, 92.

72 works in the survey exhibitions of Hong Kong art at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1995 and 2000178, although eventually Leung’s work did find its way into the museum’s collection. The limited affinity with conceptual art did not help either. Important as it has been, the ADC funding alone could not create an adequate platform to support these initiatives in a sustainable way, as the Oil Street saga in the previous chapter illustrates. Of the many artist-run initiatives, initially only Para Site managed to effectively create a viable future, by reinventing itself and linking up to the international art world and elite patronage in the 2000s. The precarious nature of artist endeavours and the limited access to formal government-led art institutions left Hong Kong artists marginalised, opportunity starved and vulnerable to the market.

3.3 Enter the International Art World The artists of the 1960s and the 1990s could surely not have imagined that, at the start of the twenty-first century, their backwater would be “the third largest art market by auction sales” after New York and London, a statistic eagerly cited by government and media alike.179 Headlines proclaiming Hong Kong ‘Asia’s arts hub’ are a dime a dozen, as if repeating this mantra will somehow make it true. Measured by the presence of brand names of global contemporary art, Hong Kong is without a doubt a big player: Gagosian, White Cube, Pace, and Perrotin represent the mega galleries, Sotheby’s and Christie’s reign the auction business, and art fair colossus Art Basel now organises yearly shows. Apart from the auction houses, these big guns are a very recent presence in the city. Art Basel only arrived in 2011, after buying a majority share in the then four year old local art fair ArtHK. Reassured by this decision, and equally attracted by Hong Kong’s vicinity to the Chinese market, freeport status, zero tax rate and dependable rule of law, many art market players that had been eyeing a piece of the Asian art boom pie followed suit, ignoring other contenders like Singapore or Shanghai. The growth of the art market has thus been swift, impactful, but also disruptive of the metaphorically soft-spoken local art scene, that meanwhile continued to engage in bottom-up initiatives.

178 Hong Kong Artists Volume I, Urban Council (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1995). Exhibition catalog; Hong Kong Artists Volume II, Leisure and Cultural Services Department (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art, 2000). Exhibition catalog. 179 Wei Gu, “Can Hong Kong Become Asia’s Arts Hub?,” The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2015, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-hong-kong-become-asias-arts-hub- 1425540545.

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The much-anticipated first instalment of Art Basel Hong Kong in May 2013 attracted the international art circus. This prompted many collateral events, including the survey exhibition Hong Kong Eye. Like its earlier iterations in Korea and Indonesia, this show was organised by Parallel Contemporary Art, a heterogeneous network that includes collectors David and Serenella Ciclitira, Saatchi Gallery in London, Hong Kong dealer Johnson Chang, and the insurance agency Prudential as sponsor. The Eye set-up entails the publication of a book that combines introductory essays with an overview of active artists and a show of a small number of these artists in the Saatchi Gallery in London, followed by a show in the home country. This formula was later repeated in three more emerging Asian markets: Malaysian Eye, Singapore Eye, and most recently, Thailand Eye. The Eye shows illustrate the changing role of actors in the art field, including the growing influence of the collector. Charles Saatchi has clearly been part of these transformations. As the first ‘specullector’, he has always bought in huge quantities while selling works from his collection in quick succession, thus blurring the boundaries between collecting and dealing art.180 As part of this strategy, Saatchi has named one movement after the other, which perhaps was testament to “an advertiser’s belief (..) in the power of the unceasing cascade of products to ensure forgetfulness.”181 By ‘discovering’ new movements and packaging their identity for easy consumption, collectors like Saatchi manage to dictate and create markets instead of chasing them. Usually focusing on national identities, his biggest success has undeniably been coining the ‘Young British Artists’ (YBA) in the early 1990s. By attaching his name to the Eye format he now ‘packages’ art in Asian nation-states. The selection of artists for the Eye projects could hardly be determined by the organiser’s overarching vision or knowledge alone, as this would necessitate in-depth knowledge of each of these places. Therefore, local advisors play an important role when the Eye franchise descends upon ‘uncharted territories’, as they will have a big impact on the direction of the exhibition. In Asian art fields, such local contacts are likely to be either state run museum officials or grassroots art professionals. These exhibitions thus end up mixing several, sometimes opposing, narratives. This is also the case for Hong Kong Eye, which highlights sixty-six contemporary artists, next to

180 Ben Lewis, “Charles Saatchi: the man who reinvented art,” The Guardian, July 10, 2011, accessed June 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jul/10/charles-saatchi-british-art-yba. 181 Julian Stallabrass, High art lite: British art in the 1990s (London: Verso, 1999), 219.

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artists from the ‘literati’ tradition and modern masters like Luis Chan and Lui Shou- kwan. The exhibition in London consisted of works of eighteen of the contemporary artists, while the iteration in Hong Kong a few months later added six more. It was lauded as the first big international showcase of Hong Kong art, providing these artists the opportunity to step out of the shadow of Chinese contemporary art. As several Hong Kong art critics noted, the project brought together artists from corners of the scene that rarely come together, connecting artists working in an international art language like Adrian Wong with practitioners from a more ‘traditional’ Cantonese art world, like Leung Kui-ting, a student of Lui Shou-kwan.182 The essays in the catalogue similarly unite several corners of the Hong Kong art world, echoing the diverse narratives that inform the art works. Representing the official Hong Kong art discourse, Christina Chu, curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, not surprisingly highlights the ‘uninterrupted tradition’ of calligraphy and brush painting in the territory.183 On the other end of the spectrum, Jesper Lau, from activist art space WooferTen, dedicates his essay to ‘people’s vessels’.184 He doesn’t shy away from criticising the Hong Kong mentality, and its blind worship of the market. For readers who venture beyond artist biographies and shiny photos, the rich essays offer a deeper understanding of the varied stories that structure art in Hong Kong, although they don’t align very well with the overview of works in the publication, which omits many of the artists mentioned in the essays.185 A set up like this could of course result in a great exhibition, in which tired narratives and artificial boundaries are being questioned and overcome. In Hong Kong’s precarious non-nation state setting, the Eye format could be a vehicle to contribute to the expression of a Hong Kong identity. But unfortunately, Hong Kong Eye doesn’t actively engage in critical analysis. Instead it presents us with another version of the narrative of Hong Kong as the place where East meets West – a storyline that as we have seen serves the interests of elites and government in Hong Kong – thus undermining critical reflexivity. It is probably not surprising that it all feels more like a public relations exercise. But for whom exactly? Not for the artists, apparently. Silas Fong, one of the exhibited artists, ended up sceptical and

182 John Batten, “In the name of identity,” South China Morning Post, January 27, 2013, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1135940/name-identity. 183 Christina Chu, “The Hong Kong Eye: A Legacy Revisited,” in Vanzella, Hong Kong Eye, 28. 184 Lau Kin Wah, “Politics of a Bio. Hong Kong Art: From Dissemination to Usage,” in Vanzella, Hong Kong Eye. 185 Batten, “Name of Identity.”

78 underwhelmed about the whole experience: he didn’t feel that the organisers engaged with him or his artistic practice and he wondered who gained from the inclusion of his work.186 Fong nonetheless did not regret participating in the exhibition; for artists in Hong Kong opportunities have been scarce, so they probably cannot afford to miss a chance at a big break, or a sliver of worldly recognition. Lam Tung-pang echoes this sentiment: “to be really honest, as an artist, sometimes I do feel a bit stressful right now, […] because […] the information came so quick and then you seem to have to react.”187 He admits that he feels an internal struggle between the ‘bohemian’ side of being an artist that predated international exposure, and the relatively new ‘professional’ side. He wonders if it is possible to have both: can you stay true to an idealistic artistic practice and make a decent living at the same time? While initiatives like Hong Kong Eye might seem harmless and it could be argued that they provide positive exposure, they end up being disruptive of local processes and infrastructures. The intervention of high profile international players in the Hong Kong art field forces artists who are not familiar with the international art world to react. The problem is not that outsiders enter the local art field; but it is problematic that they disregard local dynamics and interests that have been playing out over a longer period of time. In the end, Hong Kong Eye defines Hong Kong art and its identity from the outside; not in order to contribute to a discussion on the territory itself but to serve commodification. Such top-down branding standardises Hong Kong art and flattens Hong Kong identity; just like a Tourism Board packages a city to make it easily consumable for global citizens. Such a strategy dovetails with the government’s approach: it is one-dimensional, risk averse, and doesn’t question the status quo. The success of projects like these strengthens the administration’s tendency to follow the market when awarding subsidies through the ADC.188 The problem is articulated clearly by Jesper Lau in the catalogue of Hong Kong Eye, the lion’s den: “[W]hen arts development goes hand in hand with the market, it loses its independence in fulfilling its critical function, and the meaning of the entire game is at stake.”189

186 Silas Fong, in a conversation with the author, February 2015, Hong Kong. 187 David Clarke, Warren Leung Chi Wo, and Lam Tung-pang, audio file, 1:06:47, recording of conversation on Hong Kong Art on March 20, 2013. 188 Lau, “Politics of a Bio,” 54. 189 Ibid., 53.

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3.4 Conclusion This chapter has questioned the contribution of art to identity formation in Hong Kong, as a means to get a deeper understanding of the viability of a social role of art. Overall, this chapter sketches a pretty grim picture. The main reason is not that there have not been promising initiatives, or that the quality of the art practice is somehow lacking, but rather that both the art institutions created by the Hong Kong government and the commercial sector failed to provide a fertile ground for critical reflexivity. In each of the three periods of this chapter identity was a crucial issue. However, the power dynamics surrounding processes of identity formation, and the relative position of art in this dynamic varied considerably. Artists of the New Ink Movement were not primarily involved with a discussion about Hong Kong’s identity. However, their art has been pushed forward as the epitome of the territory’s identity, as it accommodated interests of the colonial government and Chinese elites alike. Subsequently, art institutions like the Hong Kong Museum of Art have codified the underlying ‘East meet West’ interpretation of these works, ossifying this art instead of regarding it as a living social practice. Art as a conceptual activity that might support a more decentralised and critical reflection on Hong Kong’s identity proved hard to accommodate in this constellation. This became painfully clear in the discussion of critical art practices in the years before the handover. The ADC funding provided an important catalyst for critical and reflexive practices engaging with the identity of Hong Kong. However, at the same time those practices did not land in a fertile supportive institutional framework because Hong Kong’s institutions remained preoccupied with the ossified view on art that emerged since the 1960s. In the resulting precarious setting, grassroots art organisations emerged but never got the chance to create a sustainable platform despite their tireless devotion. In the last decade, art’s critical role in discussions about the city’s identity is further hampered by the colonising tendencies of the commercial sector. The international art market is a recent arrival in Hong Kong and it does have an interest in its contemporary conceptual art. However, the commercial sector is not concerned with developing art into a reflexive practice. Instead, it employs a limited amount of often cliché narratives that package artists and artworks as easily sellable commodities and leave little room for the idiosyncrasies of the Hong Kong story. Hong Kong’s particular modernity that lacks an autonomous art infrastructure makes

80 Hong Kong especially vulnerable to such exploitation by the market. To add insult to injury, the state now uses the presence of the market to argue that government investments in art are not necessary either. The overall constellation within which art in Hong Kong has developed is clearly summarised by Oscar Ho when he states that [i]n Asia, where there is substantial government involvement in the arts, but no strong philanthropic tradition supporting creative endeavours, the government holds substantial control over resource allocation for cultural development. Curators working outside the official establishment survive with extremely limited resources. This situation often gives rise to small-scale alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government-defined cultural programs. (..) Given such spaces often rely on limited resources, temporary infrastructure and provisional funding, they are often disestablished as quickly as they are founded.190

In this setting, market actors can operate almost unhampered, as there are limited checks and balances on predatory commercial activities. Thanks to the zealous work of various local artists, art as a critical reflexive practice does exist in Hong Kong, but it is continuously pushed away by the state or muffled by the market. But maybe, in Hong Kong’s particular modernity with a government-controlled institutionalisation of art and strong market forces, such practices shouldn’t be expected within the traditional ’s art field in the first place? Maybe heterogeneous networked initiatives that link various domains provide an alternative?

190 Ho, “Under the shadow,” 183-184.

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4. Art after Autonomy

In the previous chapters I have focused on fairly traditional areas and subjects: institutions, artists, and their intersections. However, as I described at the end of the first chapter, art has moved away from rigid structures and boundaries, towards more fluid networked collaborations that link heterogeneous parties. In a new reality of structural integration, increasingly people speak with optimism about public-private partnerships. Art Basel Hong Kong director Adeline Ooi, for instance, predicts that such endeavours are the future, especially in Asia “where the distinction of what is public and what is private (..) simply does not conform to Western notions.”191 At the end of the first chapter I have suggested that under certain conditions, heterogeneous collaborations might provide alternative platforms for critical reflexivity, capable of reaching large audiences. However, Pascal Gielen warns that the future of art is at stake if the commercial sector would get to call the shots in such collaborations, fearing that “not only (..) a vodka logo may (..) be called art, but that it will be the only art in a future in which only Philip Morris decides which art really matters and may therefore be called art.”192 So in this setting of opportunities and risks, which dynamics are at play when heterogeneous actors team up in Hong Kong? And under which conditions do these collaborations support and safeguard a social role of art? These questions have great relevance for Hong Kong’s particular art field with its limited autonomy, and related scarcity of visual art offerings. In this setting, the fledgling Hong Kong audience for contemporary art is shaped by the commercial sector, which not only determines the public’s exposure to, but also its expectations of contemporary art. Without museums or other institutions for contemporary art, commercial parties de facto function as its replacements in the audience’s minds. ‘We might not have world-class museums, but we do have art fairs and auction houses to see world-class art’, is the oft-heard reasoning. This has a big influence on the concept of ‘art’ in the popular imagination, and by extension on the role that art can play in society. Not surprisingly, therefore, for the large, non-specialist audience, going to the art fair is regarded on a par with a visit to a museum, or to Disneyland for that matter.

191 Adeline Ooi, “Predictions for 2016: Rethinking Private and Public,” Blouin Artinfo, January 4, 2016, accessed June 27, 2017, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1305572/predictions-for- 2016-rethinking-private-and-public. 192 Gielen, “Autonomy via Heteronomy.”

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Against this background, in this chapter I will discuss three recent highly visible art events in Hong Kong. Each took place outside of traditional art institutions in public or collective spaces, where the unsuspecting spectator is confronted with art whilst not necessarily looking for it. These events therefore have the potential to reach a large audience, including people that would not visit art spaces. However, as David Clarke argues, art in the public space of Hong Kong “is mostly characterized by the desire to avoid controversy”,193 which might limit the potential for a social role of art. Although three events obviously do not provide a sufficient basis for generalisations, they do help to explore possibilities and limitations of networked collaborations for a social role of art. I will first discuss Chen Tianzhuo’s WAWADOLL IS X’MAS DATA (2014) in the K11 mall, arguing that art in a mall environment can be more than marketing alone. Secondly, I examine Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon (2015), an art installation that has travelled the world but encountered unique challenges in Hong Kong. And finally, I present Add Oil Team’s Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016), which shows the challenges for critical art in a risk-averse, non-autonomous setting. In the conclusion I will discuss what these hybrid events can teach us about the role that art can play in society after autonomy, in Hong Kong and beyond.

4.1 Chen Tianzhuo, WAWADOLL IS X’MAS DATA (2014) In Hong Kong’s particular modernity, the lack of clearly defined ideas about contemporary and conceptual art in society has “left a vacuum for anyone with a plan.”194 As a result, the mainstream idea of art is muddled by exposure to visual expressions in highly commercialised semi-public spaces like luxury malls, where it is hard to distinguish between art, branding, and advertising. These malls are engaged in a fierce battle for the attention of consumers, for instance through social media friendly ‘art installations’. This is especially the case during the festive season when malls pull out all the stops to create festive displays that draw in consumers and their holiday spending. The choices regarding these displays are generally extremely conservative, as not to risk upsetting the public in any way. Typically, installations feature larger than life, brightly coloured creatures that are the perfect manifestation of the Japanese term ‘kawaii’ (cuteness) and draw large amounts of people happy to

193 Clarke, Art and Place, 83. 194 Seth Denizen and Leung Po Shan Anthony, “In Defense of the Art Mall & Timeline,” Asia Art Archive, Field Notes no. 4. Publics, Histories, Values: The Changing Stakes of Exhibitions (2015): 134.

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make use of this perfect selfie backdrop. These installations reinforce that average Hongkongers associate art in public spaces with cartoon-like marketing devices. A good example is ’s Rubber Duck in Victoria Harbour, which functioned as a brilliant photo-op against Hong Kong’s skyline, courtesy of shopping mall . With a staggering 56.000 Instagram posts 195 , in terms of marketing it was a huge success, but in terms of art less so. Clearly, in this environment of heterogeneous networks dominated by shopping malls, the risk that ‘art’ will only be a means to a commercial end or ‘lifestyle’ is real. With this is mind it is easy to dismiss art in a mall environment. But then Chen Tianzhuo’s WAWADOLL IS XMAS DATA comes along in the ten-year old K11 mall in Tsim Sha Tsui (TST). Until recently, TST was mainly known as a super busy and chaotic middle class leisure and shopping area, also housing massage parlours and late night bars. As part of a large mixed-use, government initiated redevelopment project, brought K11, a new upmarket shopping experience, to the area. As one of the largest developers, one would expect New World Development to make the obvious risk-averse choices regarding their mall displays. But remarkably, Chen Tianzhuo’s WAWADOLL is anything but that. The doll in question is a giant floating head with two blond pigtails that is best described as a mixture of Edvard Munch’s Scream and a nightmare version of the anime character Sailor Moon. Her giant gaping, fire-sprouting mouth resembles that of an inflatable sex doll and her wide-open eyes suggest pleasure as much as agony. With WAWADOLL, Chen takes the main ingredients of mall art – inflatables, kawaii, anime, pop culture – and repackages them to criticise that same environment. Born in Beijing and trained at London art schools, Chen’s multi-media art employs a visual language that wouldn’t make it past the gatekeepers of good taste: several of his videos feature Asian twins with dwarfism. In Paradi$e Bitch they are draped in hip-hop paraphernalia; in Picnic they don latex masks with gaping mouths and, you guessed it, blond pigtails. His world knows no boundaries, geographically, culturally, nor morally. In ADAHA II, a 2015 performance at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, one of the main characters moves his white painted body like a Japanese butoh dancer, wearing Muay Thai shorts and gold ritualistic attire. With his face paint and long yellow and pink beard, he resembles a Hindu sadhu dressed for a rave party.

195 “Rubber Duck @ Harbour City,” Cream Global, accessed March 15, 2017, https://www.creamglobal.com/17798/33966/rubber-duck-@-harbour-city.

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After indulging in some icon smashing, this high priest of Chen’s grotesque cult goes on to ritually cleanse himself in a kiddie pool sized pond, before being hoisted high into the air, naked and upside down, to sing Lana del Rey’s hit song Born to Die; the catharsis of this mash-up of global culture, high and low. Viewed in its entirety, Chen’s body of work makes palpable both his generation’s anxiety about the future, as well as its incredible eagerness to take on the whole world. His hedonistically obscene corporeality is the social media age heir to the nihilistically obscene corporeality of earlier Chinese contemporary art, like the turn of the century ‘shock art’ using corpses and human foetuses and 1990s performance art focussing on bodily experiences. Whilst his work resembles one big, drug fuelled, boundary-transgressing party, Chen engages with themes such as queerness, gender, consumerism, and global pop culture, which give his work a clear critical reflexive dimension. How is it possible that the potentially disturbing and at least confusing work of this artist could find a home in the conservative confines of a Hong Kong shopping mall? Admittedly, his colourful, pop culture laden aesthetic translates well to social media. However, while this might veil the potentially offensive subject matter in situ, it doesn’t take away the risk as outrage is only one #tianzhuochen tap away (try it and you’ll see the point). Chen’s remarkable presence thus begs another explanation. That explanation has much to do with K11 founder . As the “executive vice chairman of the [USD] 9.4 billion New World Development real estate and retail empire founded by his grandfather”196, Cheng in many ways is the typical Hong Kong tycoon. But then again, the 38 year old also is not. Through his ‘museum retail concept’, Cheng has made art the core of his business strategy. In the next couple of years, 17 new K11 mall projects in Mainland China will be added to the current Hong Kong and Shanghai prototypes. However, maybe art is more than a branding tool to him. In 2010, Cheng set up the K11 Art Foundation (KAF), followed by residency space K11 Art village in a year later. These initiatives help to sponsor a wide range of artists in different stages of their careers. KAF is also teaming up with well- pedigreed Western art institutions like MoMA PS1 and Palais the Tokyo, organising recurring events in Hong Kong and/or the partner spaces, curated by star-curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach. Cash-strapped institutions obviously are

196 Barbara Pollack, “How a Nonprofit Cut a Global Path for Young Chinese Artists,” The New York Times, September 23, 2016, accessed June 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/arts/design/adrian-cheng-k-11-art-foundation-chinese- art.html?_r=0.

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interested in the financial clout that comes with the New World Development executive vice-chairman; but they also benefit from the extensive Chinese art world network that KAF supports. To give an idea, KAF has supported Cheng Ran’s residency at the New Museum in New York, a Chinese art focused curator at the Centre Pompidou, and the above mentioned solo show of Chen Tianzhuo at Palais de Tokyo (which travelled onwards to the K11 mall in Shanghai). Interestingly, while Cheng often cooperates with star-curators, he does not restrict his projects to celebrities alone. In case of K11’s WAWADOLL IS XMAS DATA, the organising network included curator Robin Peckham, the prototypical multi-hyphenate who, although born in the US, ‘grew up’ in Beijing’s art world. From his extensive Chinese art world network, Peckham can easily suggest artists outside the mainstream. But WAWADOLL in K11 surprised him as well, stating “I still can’t believe that they let me do this”.197 However, WAWADOLL might not have been that big of a risk after all. Obviously, the KAF initiatives serve a wider commercial purpose. They contribute to what French sociologists Boltanski and Esquerre have labelled ‘enrichissement’198: the need under post-industrial capitalism to add value to objects (and spaces) as a justification for price increases (including a higher rent) through the use of narrative. In Adrian Cheng’s case, this narrative is built through hashtags like #collectconnectcollide, #culturalentrepreneur, and most prominently #theartisanalmovement, which coincidentally is also the slogan that pops up at the top of the New World Development website. This branding is legitimised and authenticated by the KAF activities. However, the KAF art collaborations themselves also depend on their own social capital within the art world, and they have to result in events that have a quality in their own right. For this, KAF needs to collaborate with credible artists, who themselves also benefit in the process. What about the K11 visitors? In a city like Hong Kong that is dominated by simulacra, it is highly likely that many would appreciate the colourful forms while overlooking its potentially disturbing substance. Does that hurt the social role of WAWADOLL? When realising the enormous reach of art in the K11 shopping mall, the answer is ‘maybe not’. Admittedly, an Instagram search on the #wawadoll tag reveals many people posting happy “Merry Xmas” comments, acting as if nothing is

197 Robin Peckham, in a conversation with the author, December 2014, Hong Kong. 198 Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Enrichissement: Une Critique de la Marchandise (Paris: Gallimard, 2017).

91 wrong. However, others clearly sense that something is off, and that this is not a run of the mill Christmas display, with comments for instance stating: “not quite sure if this installation is for #Halloween or #Christmas … #MallsGoneWild”; “what the F is it!?”; “Guess what it is? A drag queen monkey head floating in the mid of space n got shot by two space rockets into his mouth. Still feeling happy because he got blessed by the light of Christmas tree (..) #idununderstand”; and “This doll looks like mocking the materialism of Xmas to me”. Clearly, the Wawadoll at least made some people think, and the comments – at least the ones that are posted on Instagram – were bewildered rather than negative. And just maybe it primed the conservative Hong Kong public for viewing Chen’s video’s Picnic and Paradi$e Bitch, which were on view in the mall in March 2017, just over two years after WAWADOLL in a collaboration with the veteran local artist-run space Videotage.

4.2 Antony Gormley, Event Horizon (2015) In November 2015 a group of life-size sculptures reached their destinations on the edges of 27 rooftops and on four street level locations in Central and Admiralty. It had been a long journey: against expectations, realisation took three years. The Hong Kong showing of this art installation had been initiated in 2012 by real estate branding consultant Cassius Taylor-Smith, whose non-profit ‘Very Hong Kong’ engaged with issues pertaining to the use of public space, a thorny subject in the city. Antony Gormley, the British artist responsible for the work, made a preparatory visit in the same year and was excited about adding Hong Kong to the cities that already hosted his Event Horizon: London, Rotterdam, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. The installation seeks to make people pause and look at their surroundings anew. It seemed a natural fit for Hong Kong, a densely packed high-rise city, where throngs of people travel narrow pavements with eyes glued to smartphone screens. The work should headline a cultural festival at the end of 2013, but that proved too optimistic.199 However, with help of facilitator British Council, lead sponsor K11 Art Foundation and a host of other corporate partners, the small army of replicas of Gormley’s own body finally took up their posts. Event Horizon in Hong Kong was a fact.

199 Very Hong Kong, “Very Hong Kong Announces Headline Events amid Fresh Call for Creative Ideas,” press release, August 23, 2013, accessed June 27, 2017, http://veryhk.org/files/press/VeryHongKong-Sketch_Night-Press_Release-20130823_ENG.pdf.

92 Event Horizon had acquired an air of notoriety. ‘Making Space’, Gormley’s artist talk in honour of the project, easily filled the Grand Hall at the University of Hong Kong. For an hour, Gormley candidly spoke about the role of art in society. He suggested that art can show the unknown; that it is important that it takes up a social role; and that art thereby becomes a place for discussion. Accustomed to a certain amount of controversy, he politely dismissed concerns from the audience that his work would not be ‘acceptable’: “it’s not art’s job to be acceptable. In fact, its job is to question (..) everything, (..) the last thing that art has to do is please people. I think it should disturb, undermine and question.” 200 Gormley suggested that in art ‘reflexivity’ has replaced ‘representation’. He translated these ideas to Event Horizon by recounting an earlier project of a hundred sculptures dotting the Austrian Alps. It might have prompted existential questions, for instance when someone high on a mountain wondered what a sculpture was doing there. Gormley argued that the sculpture implicitly asked the skier: and what are you doing here?201 In similar vein, Event Horizon questions where the human project fits in the scheme of things. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Gormley explicitly stressed the importance of reflexive art for Hong Kong: “This art is about Hong Kong’s growing awareness of its own unique identity that is neither its colonial past or [derived from] its new masters in Beijing.”202 He made an explicit link to the Occupy Central protests that took place a year earlier in the area where the sculptures were installed: “This project (..) is very much about the place of individuals against forces that are faceless determiners of our lives, such as forces of government and corporate power.” Event Horizon aimed to challenge a city where citizen influence is limited by an election system skewed towards business interests and that accommodates considerable control by the central (Beijing) government through the vetting of candidates. In view of its subversive character it is perhaps not surprising that realisation of the project proved a tall order. Delays especially stemmed from two sources. On the one hand, the city’s administration was at its risk-averse best, and obtaining the

200 Antony Gormley, “Making Space,” video, 1:28:05, from an artist talk on 16 November, 2015, accessed June 27, 2017, https://www.cobosocial.com/cobo-salon/making-space-an-artist-talk-by- antony-gormley/?utm_campaign=partnership_art&utm_medium=ps_video&utm_source=british- council. 201 Gormley, “Making Space.” 202 Enid Tsui, “Art as acupuncture: Antony Gormley on statues Hong Kong rooftops will host,” South China Morning Post, October 30, 2015, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts- entertainment/article/1873840/art-acupuncture-antony-gormley-statues-hong-kong.

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necessary permits was a herculean task. Problems were exacerbated due to corporate sponsorships: the second problem. Historically, corporate support for art projects has been reluctant at best. In this case, it turned out to be fickle when Hongkong Land, the project’s lead sponsor, withdrew in 2014 on the request of a tenant, investment bank JPMorgan, after one of their employees had committed suicide by jumping of . This robbed Event Horizon of its lead sponsor and of the locations to host the sculptures. It also meant that the project organisers needed to engage in a fresh round of permit requests, which compounded the first source of delays. Eventually, the project was saved. The sponsorship problem was taken care of when Adrian Cheng – yes, him again – and his K11 Art Foundation stepped in as lead sponsor. Asked about the risks of sponsoring the controversial project, Adrian Cheng responded: “What’s the point of saying you support the arts, that it’s part of your corporate social responsibility, when you don’t support anything with an impact?”203 With this jibe at Hongkong Land, Cheng also explicitly embraced Gormley’s ideas about a social role of art. With newfound sponsorship, the project still needed to pass the city’s administrative apparatus. It reportedly took the personal interference by Carrie Lam, the territory’s second in command, to give the project the all systems go.204 Not surprisingly, her support had less to do with her love for critical, reflexive art and more with the fierce intercity competition in East Asia and the perceived threat that Event Horizon might end up elsewhere.205 This incentive is illustrated by Lam’s statement in the press release: “I am pleased that this Asian premiere of Event Horizon in Hong Kong has demonstrated to the world our city’s progressive and promising development into a regional hub of arts and culture, as well as reinforced our position as an economy where creative industries are set to prosper.”206 So, in Hong Kong’s setting, which is hardly conducive to show art with a social role, a heterogeneous network of government, NGO and commercial parties managed to do just that. It begs the question if this remarkable feat is reproducible.

203 Enid Tsui, “Hong Kong companies split over whether to fund contentious art,” South China Morning Post, 7 December 2015, accessed June 17, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts- entertainment/article/1886383/hong-kong-companies-divided-over-supporting-contentious. 204 Madeleine Ross, “Gallery Without Walls: The Case For Public Art in Hong Kong,” Hong Kong Tatler, 14 March 2016, accessed June 17, 2017, http://hk.asiatatler.com/arts-culture/arts/gallery- without-walls-the-case-for-public-art-in-hong-kong. 205 Robert Ness, foreword to Antony Gormley: Event Horizon Hong Kong, ed. Rosalind Horne and Cassius Taylor-Smith, (Hong Kong: The British Council, 2016) 4. 206 British Council Hong Kong, “Event Horizon changed the future of public art in Hong Kong,” press release, May 25, 2016, accessed June 27, 2017, https://www.britishcouncil.hk/en/about/press/event- horizon-changed-future-public-art-hong-kong.

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The British Council certainly seemed to think so, stating that “Event Horizon changed the future of public art in Hong Kong.”207 Gormley himself apparently agreed, arguing that the project constituted a “profound change of mentality” in this risk- averse city.208 But in front of a smaller audience during a panel discussion in the Fringe Club, the tone was less boisterous. According to Hong Kong art world veteran Benny Chia: “Unless you have access to the top, [nowadays] it is very difficult for individuals and small organizations to do anything.”209 Remarkably, Robert Ness, Director of British Council Hong Kong, chimed in with a resigned “we live in risk averse times…”210 We do not know for sure how Event Horizon has changed these structural complications. Most likely, public servants will be left with a negative experience from the project proceedings, as they thought that they had acted appropriately, but were then overruled. Meanwhile, Enid Tsui observed that “(..) there are fears that the controversy (..) may further discourage local companies from backing contemporary art projects. After all, sponsoring a classical music concert is a much safer way of adding an aura of sophistication to their brands.”211 In view of the importance of the international allure of Event Horizon for city branding, it is questionable if this model to organise critical, reflexive art could also work with projects of lesser-known artist, or that engage with issues that hit closer to home; a fear that is only reinforced by the experiences of the Add Oil Team.

4.3 Add Oil Team, Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016) Sampson Wong and Jason Lam, together the ‘Add Oil Team’, could have taken Antony Gormley’s words on art as the blueprint for their artistic practice. Deriving their name from a distinct Chinese rallying cry that is meant to invigorate and express encouragement, which was often used during the pro-democracy Occupy Central protests, they wear their affiliation with the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement on their sleeves. Wong and Lam came to prominence during these protests when they set up the Add Oil Machine (2014), an interactive installation that projected messages of support on the side of the Central Government Complex in the middle of the occupied

207 Ibid. 208 Gormley, “Making Space.” 209 British Council Hong Kong, “Beyond Event Horizon - The Future of Public Art in Hong Kong (Part 3),” video, 29:51, from a panel discussion in the Fringe Club on May 17, 2016, accessed June 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqfUrMRbLI&feature=youtu.be. 210 Ibid. 211 Enid Tsui, “Hong Kong companies split.”

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area; eventually almost 40.000 messages poured in from all over the world. Wong is also known for organising Affordable Art Basel, an initiative addressing the exclusionary and alien nature of the international art fair; and Hacking Freespace Fest, a critique of the increasingly none-inclusive nature of an event under the same name in West Kowloon Cultural District. For some, these guerrilla style interventions and art projects are activism rather than art; they surely interpret critical reflexive art in a very political way. With a track record like this, it may come as no surprise that the Add Oil Team became the centre of an art world row. The source of this controversy was Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016), an installation that was part of the “Fifth Large-Scale Public Media Art Exhibition: Human Vibrations”. Initiated by the government, the exhibition was commissioned by the Arts Development Council and curated by Hong Kong-based independent French curator Caroline Ha Thuc. It consisted of works by international and local artists, complemented with talks, educational programs and artist workshops, all aimed at engaging a wide audience. The events took place all over the city in a variety of venues: busy Pier 9 next to ’s Star Ferry, government spaces provided by the LCSD, and commercial venues such as the and the International Commerce Centre (ICC). Wong and Lam’s contribution to the exhibition consisted of a nine and a half minute video that, together with the animated works of several other artists, was displayed along the 77.000 m2 LED covered façade of the ICC. With almost 500 metres, at night this tallest building of Hong Kong stands in stark contrast to its relatively dark West Kowloon surroundings, making it an inescapable beacon of the territory’s successful capitalism. Normally, its screen displays cutesy animations in the spirit of the generic ‘mall art’, discussed in section 4.1. It has a history of hosting media art by local and international artists as well; for instance during Art Basel Hong Kong, or in the context of the ‘Open Sky Gallery’, a collaboration with City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media. The title and concept of Our 60-second friendship begins now is derived from Wong Kar-wai’s movie Days of Being Wild (1990). In one of its iconic scenes, two darlings of Cantonese pop culture, Maggie Cheung and Leslie Cheung, together watch a minute go by; a shared moment of friendship that binds them forever. The scene is an example of Wong Kar-wai’s recurrent references to the ambiguous perception of time, which, as mentioned in section 3.2, was a crucial element in the city’s

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imagination in the years leading up to the handover. Taking inspiration, Wong and Lam divided their work in six segments, each tracking the passing of one minute, alternated by a textual reference to the movie scene in both English and Cantonese. The artist statement presented the work as an invitation “to celebrate this memorable cinematic moment” and encouraged “people to have impromptu interactions with each other”.212 A day after the first showing, the artists launched a media campaign to inform local and international outlets of another reading of the work. Branding the last segment of their video ‘Countdown Machine’, they explained that the nine digits that cover the full length of the ICC for a minute are counting down to 1 July 2047, the expiration date of the current 50-year agreement on the semi-autonomous status of Hong Kong. This references similar clocks shown by the PRC government throughout China in the run-up to the 1997 handover. Wong and Lam aimed to attract attention to another upcoming deadline, thus confronting Hong Kong people with one of the most anxiety inducing aspect of their lives. While this recontextualisation of the artwork already seems confrontational, the timing made it especially subversive as it coincided with the first visit of a high- ranking Mainland Chinese official since the pro-democracy protests almost two years earlier. During the three-day visit of Zhang Dejiang, whose tasks include overseeing Hong Kong affairs, the stakes were high for the Hong Kong government. The city was on lockdown to ensure there would be no ‘embarrassment’, while 8000 police officers were deployed to prevent people from ‘causing trouble’. Bricks were glued to the pavement and protests were not allowed. Apart from some minor incidents it proved impossible to demonstrate and to get messages across to Zhang.213 Regardless of guarantees under the Basic Law, freedom of expression was thus de facto suspended. However, by ‘hacking’ the ICC, the Add Oil Team effectively broke this blockade when they broadcasted their concerns about the future of Hong Kong loud and clear across the harbour. As many news outlets pointed out, it was definitely visible from Zhang’s hotel room.

212 Karen Cheung, “Ungrounded, unjustified and arbitrary’: Artists slam removal of ICC protest art”, Hong Kong Free Press, May 25, 2016, accessed May 25, 2017, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/05/25/ungrounded-unjustified-and-arbitrary-artists-slam-removal- of-icc-protest-art/. 213 Phila Siu, Jeffie Lam, and Christy Leung, “We’re now on a counterterrorism operation’: Hong Kong police deploy 8,000 officers, threaten ‘decisive action’ against Zhang Dejiang protesters,” South China Morning Post, May 18, 2016, accessed June 27, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/politics/article/1946643/were-now-counterterrorism-operation-hong-kong-police-deploy/.

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Wong and Lam’s statement resulted in extensive international media coverage, but other than that at first surprisingly little happened.214 Night after night the video was played unaltered on the ICC. After five days the ADC finally broke its silence, announcing that it would stop displaying the work. In a mutual statement, Ellen Pau, chairman of the ADC Film and Media Art group, and curator Ha Thuc justified the decision with reference to a perceived breach of contract by the artists. By changing the title and statement of the work and publishing these changes without consulting the curator, they argued that the artists had shown “disrespect (..) against the original agreement”, thus “jeopardising our profession and put[ing] at risk any future possibility to work further in the public space”215. The decision to cancel the work was not an act of censorship, but a professional sanction. Pau and Ha Thuc did not make any reference to the fact that the artists knew that there were “clear guidelines saying that no message with political elements could be shown on the ICC”216, a restriction that is common for commercial organisations in Hong Kong.217 The next day, the artists sent out an official response, contesting that they made changes to the artwork, while challenging the legitimacy of the removal of their work.218 The facts of the actual conversations between curator and artists will probably never be clear. They might even not be that important, compared to the more fundamental difference of opinion about the role of art in society that was revealed in the aftermath of the conflict. Some condemned the Add Oil Team, shaming Wong and Lam as ‘attention seekers’, ‘shameless self-promoters’, or ‘careerist’. Others stressed that Wong was a geologist by trade and Lam had never been that deeply involved in

214 Christina Sanchez-Kozyreva, ‘“It’s All Fear Circulating’: Interpreting a Towering Artwork’s Removal in Hong Kong,” Hyperallergic, June 6, 2016, accessed May 26, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/303427/its-all-fear-circulating-intrepreting-a-towering-artworks-removal-in- hong-kong. 215 Karen Cheung, “ICC building protest art suspended as Arts Council slams artists’ “disrespect”,” Hong Kong Free Press, May 23, 2016, accessed May 25, 2017, www.hongkongfp.com/2016/05/23/icc- building-protest-art-suspended-as-arts-council-slams-artists-disrespect/. 216 Karen Cheung, “ICC building distances itself from 2047 ‘protest’ as artist reveals how he evaded possible censorship,” Hong Kong Free Press, May 19, 2016, accessed May 25, 2017, www.hongkongfp.com/2016/05/19/icc-building-distances-itself-from-2047-protest-as-artist-reveals- how-he-evaded-possible-censorship/. 217 Man Ching-ying Phoebe, “Only numbers,” Art Asia Pacific 101 (2016), accessed May 26, 2017, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/101/OnlyNumbers. 218 Sampson Wong and Jason Lam, “Artists’ response to the suspension of “Our 60-second friendship begins now” by Arts Development Council (ADC) and “Human Vibrations” exhibition curator,” May 23, 2016, accessed June 1, 2017, http://sampsonwong.hk/Resonse%20to%20HKADC’s%20statement.pdf.

102 the Hong Kong art world.219 While some of these responses illustrate the pettiness of the Hong Kong art world, behind such accusations is a deeper conviction in Hong Kong society that people like Wong and Lam are ‘troublemakers’. Disregarding the unwritten rule to operate within predetermined lines and not upset hierarchies, they make life harder for everyone in the already underfunded setting of Hong Kong’s art world, endangering future projects in the public sphere and elsewhere. However, opposing such a non-confrontational pragmatism, others stress the need for a more antagonistic role of art. They for instance argue that “all public art in Hong Kong has to go through an approval process that involves agencies aligned with the powerful real estate industry, which in turn is involved with promoting the Mainland’s agenda. Only by doing something subversive [can] artists get their message across.”220 This is very relevant for the Add Oil Team saga, as the ICC building is owned by Sun Hung Kai’s Kwok brothers, two of the largest Hong Kong real estate moguls with enormous development interests in Mainland China. In an interview Wong himself says: “I am just trying to do what artists do, challenge and provoke. (..) But what is art if all you do is expecting money? And what does it mean that if the ICC says there should not be political work and the HKADC and the curator fully accept that condition?”221 Phoebe Man summarises this underlying problem, wondering “whether the [ADC] should invest its resources in venues that restrict artists from expressing themselves freely.” 222 Yang Yeung, founder of alternative art space Soundpocket, concludes that artists should not just aim for professional survival, but that they are obliged to contribute to society by questioning reality. She criticises the art institutions, i.e. the curator and the ADC, as they have not stood up for art’s possibility to do so.223 Illustrating that Hong Kong art institutions might not be willing to safeguard this social role of art, the ADC has erased all evidence of the Add Oil Team participation from the digital annals of history. Clearly, it is questionable if heterogeneously networked art events will be able to support a social role of art beyond the rare ‘pet projects’ that involve internationally renowned

219 Ellen Pearlman, “1,588-foot-tall artwork lights up a political inferno in Hong Kong,” Hyperallergic, June 1, 2016, accessed May 26, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/301716/1588-foot-tall-artwork-lights- up-a-political-inferno-in-hong-kong/. 220 Ibid. 221 Sanchez-Kozyreva, ‘“It’s All Fear Circulating’.” 222 Man, “Only numbers.” 223 Yang Yeung, “We may never know, but it’s worth trying,” International Association of Art Critics Hong Kong, November 15, 2016, accessed May 26, 2017, http://www.aicahk.org/eng/reviews.asp?id=441&pg=1.

104 artists and relatively ‘safe’ subjects, or without artists that manage to ‘hack’ such events.

4.4 Conclusion This chapter discusses the reality in Hong Kong of ‘art after autonomy’. As the art institutions within Hong Kong’s particular modernity do not provide a fertile ground for critical reflexivity, I wondered if networked art initiatives create an alternative setting for critical reflexivity. This question might seem alien for someone socialised in a particular modernity with a (relatively) independent art field, where the existence of this autonomy is depicted as the precondition for critical reflexivity. However in places like Hong Kong with particular modernities that have generated less autonomy, heterogeneously networked events maybe provide possibilities as much as dangers. Of course, three events only allow an exploratory view, and no firm conclusions. With that in mind, I argue that in Hong Kong heterogeneous art events seem to have spread very rapidly. This is not totally surprising, as driving forces behind structural integration like neoliberalism, expediency and the market are core parts of the city’s DNA. Increasingly, art seems to be everywhere, confronting a large audience that might not go to formal art institutions; an audience also, that as I concluded previously, is not accustomed to a broad understanding of art and for whom the idea that art can play a social role is not directly obvious. Overall, the three events certainly indicate that it is hard to organise such a role in networked events in Hong Kong, as core elements of it’s reflexivity-averse particular modernity easily carry over into these collaborations: the vast majority of mall art projects are geared towards easy consumption; Event Horizon came about against the grain of bureaucratic and corporate risk averseness, only because Antony Gormley is a world-renowned artist and repeating this with lesser known artists is highly unlikely; and the Add Oil Team could only share it’s critical message by ‘hacking’ a government-initiated art event. The three events suggest that Claire Bishop’s characterisation – building on Chiapello and Boltanski’s New Spirit of Capitalism – of ‘post-studio site-responsive artists’ and ‘the roving global curators’ who aim to integrate themselves into a new project afterwards, continuously looking for the next opportunity to develop their one- person corporation, at least partly seems to hold true. While Chen Tianzhuo and Antony Gormley seem to be masters of the follow-up project, the Add Oil Team were criticised for having the same modus operandi, thus being ‘careerist’, and the

105 reluctance of the curator of the exhibition certainly relates to a concern about future projects. These dynamics are reinforced by the motivations of other participants to the collaborations. While the Hong Kong government wants to improve the allure of the city Hong Kong, corporate parties aim to use art to attract consumers, or to increase the value of their real estate operations. Enrichissement, another of Boltanski’s books, this time together with Esquerre, certainly seems to lie at the core of these strategies that employ narratives to add value to objects and spaces.224 In this constellation, the content of the art events does not always take precedence. This apprehensive reading of the three events at least in part reflects the characteristics of Hong Kong’s particular modernity, as well as the state- and market- driven dynamics that come with networked collaborations. However, at the same time, the three events contain more positive indications as well. First of all, within the particular setting of Hong Kong’s art field where this is hardly common, each of these events results in critical reflexive art. WAWADOLL shows that, perhaps surprisingly, more challenging art can prevail in a mall setting, provided that one of the commercial participants has an explicit commitment to such art. In this case, the strategic importance of links with more traditional art institutions means that KAF needs to demonstrate a high degree of art world credibility. This confirms the lasting importance of those ‘old-fashioned’ institutions for the social role of art after autonomy. Event Horizon did result in art with a social role, even though the setting was not conducive to such art and in spite of the questionable motives of some of its participants. The Add Oil Team shows that there are possibilities to ‘hack’ non- receptive events. At the same time, however, it made abundantly clear that there is an urgent need for (art) institutions to take an explicit stand in favour of a social role of art. In other words, these cases suggest that heterogeneous events could result in critical reflexive art, provided that at least one core participant feels that this is important. Pascal Gielen’s argument that heterogeneous funding is crucial for the critical function of art thus certainly rings true. Meanwhile art institutions – either at a distance or as direct participants – have a crucial role in safeguarding a social role of art as well. In view of these conclusions, it would be good shift the focus from criticism on heterogeneous events as such, to the conditions under which these events can produce art with a social role.

224 Boltanski and Esquerre, Enrichissement.

106 Conclusion

While the world is increasingly connected both physically and symbolically, in the setting of my own Dutch education the related necessary openness proved hard to accommodate. Increasingly aware of the biases that this created, I became eager to explore and question my own very Western habitus. As a result, I embarked on a personal confrontation with Hong Kong, a former art periphery. This certainly didn’t come easy, though. It is hard to unlearn ways of seeing, and impossible to see what you don’t see. On top of this, it turned out that I had to overcome a double challenge: first I had to learn to open up to other ways of thinking about and ‘doing’ art and to have a meaningful, respectful transfield dialogue, open to other subjectivities; second, I also had to open up to the reality that the structural basis of my Western habitus was undermined by various forces that challenged it from the inside and outside. Along the way, I found new ways of looking at art, and new places to look for it. But I also found that there are parts of my own cultural heritage that I want to retain, like the idea that art should play a social role. The first chapter is a reflection of this confrontational personal journey. As a starting point for my encounter with Hong Kong, I formulated the following research question: To what extent does Hong Kong’s particular modernity support a social role of art? My analysis of the ‘Arts of the State’ indicates that in Hong Kong’s particular modernity, the idea of an autonomous art field has never been institutionalised. Following the history of government involvement with art, it became clear that the resulting limited autonomy, and the related aversion to a critical reflexive role of art, has to be understood against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s colonial heritage, the primacy of economic development in its government policies, and its uncomfortable position vis-à-vis Mainland China. My analysis of discussions about ‘Heung Geung Yan’ suggests that this setting creates considerable obstacles for art as a critical reflexive practice. Art has been easily appropriated by the state, while the market limits the space for a social role of art as well. And while the ADC has played an important role stimulating bottom-up art initiatives with a social role, these are continuously hampered by their precarious setting. As a result, the idea that art should play a social role is not developed in the popular imagination.

107

The rather sudden and dramatic entrance of the international art world in Hong Kong in the wake of the growth of the market and the decision to build a new M+ museum has been rather disconcerting for local art institutions, artists and art professionals. The local art scene is divided between optimistic pragmatists that see practical possibilities (see the criticism of the Add Oil Team) and worn down ‘realists’, tired of the limited results from decades of fighting against the current. Confronted with an international art crowd that is often also very pragmatic as well as optimistic about the possibilities in Hong Kong, they needed time to reposition themselves and find a new role as part of the ‘globalised contemporary art world system’. Within this rather repressive setting, events organised by heterogeneous parties that take place outside of the formal art institutions provide alternative opportunities for a social role of art, so I conclude in my analysis of ‘Art after Autonomy’. Admittedly, the characteristics of Hong Kong’s particular modernity and of the market easily carry over to these collaborations, and many heterogeneous events thus mainly result in art as marketing tool or lifestyle. This is amplified by the emergence of entrepreneurial artists and curators, and by ‘enrichissement’ strategies of commercial parties. However, it became clear that, under the right conditions, these heterogeneous initiatives can produce critical reflexive art as well. After all, while exceptional, each of the three events that I analysed did produce art, which, in the specific cultural setting of Hong Kong, played a social role. One of the crucial conditions is that (art) institutions need to take a stand and curb the tendencies undermining critical reflexivity; defending a social role of art as a partner in heterogeneous networks; setting a standard regarding the importance of such a role of art in general discussions from the outside; and helping to nurture an understanding of the importance of critical reflexive art in society. By not too easily succumbing to a new curriculum that focuses on management and entrepreneurship, art schools and art-related programmes can certainly also play their role through the socialisation of artists and art professionals. As a result of these possibilities, heterogeneous events as such are neither good nor bad, a conclusion that is especially relevant to an art field like Hong Kong, where the social role of art is not embedded in formal institutions. So, does Hong Kong’s particular modernity support a social role of art? The answer is that the conditions for critical reflexive art are certainly not good, but that art with a social role nonetheless does exist, albeit often in unexpected places. And

108 therein lies one of the other difficulties of going to Hong Kong: in many of the familiar places that you would visit in the West, often you will not find critical reflexive art. However, quality is not necessarily linked to specific places, and in unexpected places there turn out to be unexpected things. It is hardly possible to take a venue at face value, or to regard previous projects as a guarantee for the quality of those in the future. Even a shopping mall can host a worthwhile art event, as the outcome of an art initiative depends on partners and alliances. This illegibility in general characterises art fields in former peripheries that do not have an institutional setting conducive to critical reflexive art, and where a proliferation of heterogeneous events adds to the possibilities of art with a social role. Thus, speaking about Bangkok, Ralph Kiggell observes that [h]owever much we might wish to package both Bangkok and its art scene, they are slippery organisms that defy easy categorization. (..) As for an identifiable art locus in Bangkok, someone new here would have a tough time knowing where to start.225

Just maybe, in the near future, this will also be the case in the art fields of the former centre.

225 Ralph Kiggell, “A gallaxy of galleries: Exploring Bangkok’s ever evolving art scene”, Bangkok101, April 10, 2017, accessed July 5, 2017, https://www.bangkok101.com/bangkok-art-scene-galleries/.

109

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118 Images

Front cover Samson Young. Stanley. 2015, C-prints on paper, neon sign, and sand, variable dimensions. Part of exhibition ‘Before. After' at Oi!. Photo by Sharon Tam, February 14, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017, http://blog.ulifestyle.com.hk/blogger/sharontam0712/2016/02/.

1.1 Chéri Samba. Hommage aux anciens créateurs.1999, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 151 x 201 cm. Image taken by author at exhibition “Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier” at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, May 10, 2017.

1.2 Bhupen Khakhar. You Can’t Please All. 1981, Oil on canvas, 175.6 x 175.6 cm. Website of Tate Modern, accessed July 1, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/khakhar-you-cant-please-all-t07200.

1.3 Bhupen Khakhar. American Survey Officer. 1969, Oil on canvas, 105.4 x 86.6 cm. Website of Tate Modern, accessed July 1, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate- modern/exhibition/bhupen-khakhar.

2.1 Poster for the travelling exhibition Recent British Sculpture at City Hall, Hong Kong, 1964. Website Asia Art Archive, accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/hong-kong-art-history-research- project-1964/object/recent-british-sculpture-exhibition-poster.

2.2 Exterior view of Hong Kong Museum of Art. Accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.expedia.co.th/en/Hong-Kong-Museum-Of-Art-Hong- Kong.d6074660.Attraction?rfrr=Redirect.From.www.expedia.com%2525252FHong- Kong-Museum-Of-Art-Hong-Kong.d6074660.Vacation-Attraction.

2.3 Gallery display in Hong Kong Museum of Art. Accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.expedia.co.th/en/Hong-Kong-Museum-Of-Art-Hong- Kong.d6074660.Attraction?rfrr=Redirect.From.www.expedia.com%2525252FHong- Kong-Museum-Of-Art-Hong-Kong.d6074660.Vacation-Attraction.

2.4 - 2.9 Almond Chu. Photographic records of Oil Street artist village, 1998. Website of Asia Art Archive, accessed July 1, 2017, http://www.aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/oil-street-almond-chu/page/1.

2.10 Tam Wai Ping. Falling into the Mundane World at Mobile M+ Inflation! on the site of the future West Kowloon Culture District, 2013. Website of M+ Museum, accessed July 1, 2017, http://www.westkowloon.hk/en/mplus/m-programmes/mobile- m-inflation/chapter/multimedia-127.

2.11 Tsang Kin-wah. The Fourth Seal at Mobile M+ Yau Ma Tei, 2012. Website of M+ Museum, accessed July 1, 2017, http://www.westkowloon.hk/en/whats-on/past- events/mobile-m-yau-ma-tei/chapter/multimedia-124.

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3.1 Lui Shou-kwan. Zen Painting. Undated, Chinese ink and colour on paper, 151.7 x 83.1. Marked with two seals of the artist and one collector’s seal. Website of Sotheby’s, accessed May 14, 2017, http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2016/contemporary-ink-art- hk0658/lot.510.html)/.

3.2 Lui Shou-kwan, Fishing Village Landscape. 1963, Chinese ink and colour on paper, 37.5 x 94 cm. Website of Alisan Fine Art, accessed May 14, 2017, http://www.alisan.com.hk/en/artists_detail.php?id=3.

3.3 Exhibition view of Lui Shou-kwan exhibition at City Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Hong Kong, 1964. Website of Asia Art Archive, accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/hong-kong-art-history-research- project-1964/object/lui-shou-kwan/view_as/grid/sort/title-asc/tab/items.

3.4 Poster of Lui Shou-kwan exhibition at City Hall, Hong Kong, 1964. Website of Hong Kong Museum of Art, Leisure and Cultural Services Department, Hong Kong, accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/ce/Museum/Arts/artportal/poster/EH1964_0011.jpg.

3.5 Luis Chan. Untitled (View of Lavender Harbour from the Peak). 1959, watercolour on paper, 36.5 x 46.5 cm. Image courtesy Hanart TZ Gallery.

3.6 Luis Chan. Untitled (Fantasy Landscape with Seaside Village). 1970, ink and colour on paper, 57 x 74 cm. Image courtesy Hanart TZ Gallery.

3.7 Luis Chan. Untitled. 1985, ink and colour on paper, 69 x 136 cm. Image courtesy Hanart TZ Gallery.

3.8 Invitation to exhibition Relic/Image, by ‘Artist in Western’ at Para Site, Hong Kong, 1996. Website of Asia Art Archive, accessed June 21, 2017, http://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/library/artist-in-western-relicimage.

3.9 Warren Leung Chi Wo. Detail from Dream of a Path.1996, temporary site- specific mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Website of Leung Chi Wo, accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.leungchiwo.com/dream_of_a_path/Dream_of_a_path.html.

3.10 Warren Leung Chi Wo. Untitled (After Dream of a Path) 1996, oil on paper, plexiglass and wood, set of five, 244 x 60 cm each. Website of Leung Chi Wo, courtesy Hong Kong Museum of Art, accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.leungchiwo.com/afterdream/After_Dream.html.

3.11 Phoebe Man Ching-ying. Reunification with China, I am happy. Reunification with China, I am happy. Reunification with China, I am happy. Reunification with China, I am happy. Reunification with China, I am happy… 1997, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Temporarily installed in the Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre. Website of Hong Kong Art Archive, University of Hong Kong, accessed June 27, 2017, http://finearts.hku.hk/hkaa/revamp2011/work.php?id=712.

120 3.12 Kith Tsang Tak Ping. Detail from Hello! Hong Kong – Part 7. 1997, temporary site-specific mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Website of Hong Kong Art Archive, University of Hong Kong, accessed June 27, 2017, http://finearts.hku.hk/hkaa/revamp2011/work.php?id=888.

3.13 Exhibition view of Hong Kong Eye at Saatchi Gallery, London, 2012. With works by Kum Chi-keung (Wisdom, foreground) and Lam Tung-pang (Vanish, left wall). Photo by John Batten, accessed June 27, 2017, http://www.aicahk.org/pic/review/1johnKum%20Chi%20Keung%20HK%20Eye.jpg.

3.14 Adrian Wong. Kasper Hauser, Ramachandra, and Natascha The Dog Girl Of Chita. 2011, animatronic installation. Website of Hong Kong Eye, accessed June 27, 2017, http://hongkongeye.co/en/artist/adrian-wong-ho-yin-1.

3.15 Leung Kui-ting. Vision Change No. 2. 2005, ink on silk and wood, installation, 500 × 300 × 100 cm. Website of Hong Kong Eye, accessed June 27, 2017, http://hongkongeye.co/en/artist/kui-ting-leung.

4.1 - 4.2 Florentijn Hofman Rubber Duck in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong. 2013, inflatable, 14 × 15 × 16.5 m.

4.3 #wawadoll: social media engagement with Chen Tianzhuo’s WAWADOLL IS XMAS DATA at K11 Mall, Hong Kong, 2013, through Instagram. Screenshot of Instagram #wawadoll, accessed July 1, 2017.

4.4 - 4.5 Chen Tianzhuo. ADAHA II. 2015, performance at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 44’. Website of Tianzhuo Chen, accessed May 16, 2017, http://tianzhuochen.com/?p=728.

4.6 Chen Tianzhuo. Still from PICNIC. 2014, 3-channel video installation, 07’50”. Website of Tianzhuo Chen, accessed May 16, 2017, http://tianzhuochen.com/?p=481.

4.7 - 4.9 Antony Gormley. Event Horizon Hong Kong. 2015, 27 fibreglass and 4 cast iron figures, 189 x 53 x 29cm (each element). Website of Event Horizon Hong Kong, accessed February 28, 2017, http://www.eventhorizon.hk/.

4.10 Add Oil Team. Stand By You: Add Oil Machine. 2014, interactive multimedia installation. Facebook page of Add Oil Team, accessed June 26, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/addoilteam/photos/.

4.11 Wong Kar-wai. Days of Being Wild. 1990, movie, 01:34:00. Accessed July 2, 2017, https://hkauteur.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/days-of-being-wild-by-wong-kar- wai-a-tribute-to-35mm-film/.

4.12 Add Oil Team. Our 60-second friendship begins now at ICC, Hong Kong. 2016, multimedia installation, 09’30”. Facebook page of Add Oil Team, accessed June 26, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/addoilteam/photos/.

4.13 Add Oil Team. Countdown Machine. Website Add Oil Team, accessed May 14, 2017, http://addoilteam.hk/index.html.

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Pictures of Hong Kong

Throughout the pages of this thesis, I have added a small selection of full-page sized photo’s that can help the reader to imagine Hong Kong. This list gives an overview of the subject matter of these images:

Page 4 North façade of the High Block of Hong Kong City Hall. The uppermost floors housed the ‘City Hall Museum and Art Gallery (later Hong Kong Museum of Art) from 1962 until 1991. Photo by author, November 17, 2016. Page 6 The industrial past of ‘made in Hong Kong’ is still visible in the industrial buildings of Fo Tan. After production left Hong Kong for Mainland China, the vacant large spaces and relatively low rent drew artists to the neighbourhood. This has allowed them to maintain a studio practice, which used to be a luxury they couldn’t afford. Since 2001 a collective of artists organises the annual open studio weekend Fotanian. Photo by author, November 17, 2016. Page 10 After much delay work is underway at the site of the M+ Museum, part of the West Kowloon Cultural District. Photo by author, December 2, 2016. Page 14 Cattle Depot Artist Village in Kowloon. After this cattle quarantine and slaughter centre was closed in 1999, the site was renovated by the government in 2001 to house the art initiatives that had been displaced after the closing of Oil Street. Some of them, such as 1a Space and Videotage, are still operating from this location. Photo by author, November 17, 2016. Page 56 Students at the Kai Tak campus of Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts in Kowloon. The early 20th century building used to serve as the Officers’ Mess of the Royal Air Force. Photo by author, November 17, 2016. Page 82 Courtyard of Oi!, a Leisure and Cultural Services Department-led art space on 12 Oil Street, North Point. From 1998 until late 1999 this was the site of a community driven artist village, housing studios and exhibition spaces. At that time the complex consisted of colonial era buildings of the former Royal Yacht Club and the eight-storey Former Government Supplies Department Depot. The latter has been torn down. Photo by author, November 17, 2016. Page 110 A group of schoolchildren are seen leaving the M+ Pavilion. With the increasing amount of art related activities in the city, class visits to museums, art spaces, and art fairs become more common. Photo by author, December 2, 2016. Page 122 French street artist Invader’s rendering of a character from the 1984 arcade game Kung-Fu Master on a residential building in Tin Hau, Hong Kong. Photo by author, November 17, 2016.

123