Views on a Former Periphery: Hong Kong in the Contemporary Art World Lara van Meeteren | 5835585 Master Thesis Art History (Contemporary Art) University of Amsterdam 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 Hong Kong 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 Hong Kong Dollar ICC International Commerce Centre KAF K11 Art Foundation LCSD Leisure and Cultural Services Department PMQ Police Married Quarters SAR Special Administrative Region TST Tsim Sha Tsui USD United States Dollar WKCDA West Kowloon Cultural District Authority YBA Young British Artists Remark on Names Hong Kong is officially a bilingual territory, and English and Cantonese 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 China. 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.