An Overview of the Transitions Undergone by Major Art Exhibition Venues during the Last Decade (original) (raw)

Hong Kong and the Production of Art in the Post/colonial City

Contemporary and alternative art in Hong Kong has strong local roots and translocal connections, and while it reflects cultural politics in the city it lacks substantial international recognition. This interdisciplinary analysis focuses on the contexts of production of contemporary art by women in Hong Kong and their centrality in the city’s arts community. The narrative contrasts the presence of contemporary and alternative arts and its absence from art criticism discourses through the disjuncture between the geopolitics of contemporary Asian art and the making of Hong Kong into an unprecedented territorial formation. Reading local art through alternative space–time concepts and intersubjective arts practice is proposed through the exhibit-event, “If Hong Kong, A Woman/Traveller.”

CONTEMPORARY HONG KONG ART: AUTHENTICITY & RESISTANCE

Hong Kong contemporary art is gaining more and more recognition but is still not very well known to the European and American public. Hong Kong is a very singular place, and so are its artists. Living in the temple of liberalism and surrounded by materialism, many develop a kind of resistance toward the system and its capitalistic values. Giving an overview of the today's local art scene, this article analyses how art and resistance are entwined in the teritorry.

Art Writing and its Circulation: Three Moments in Hong Kong

This essay considers the kinds of art writing that document, critically respond to and generate discourse about art. Creative writing responses to works of art are a separate discussion that beckons another piece of writing itself. Here at Asia Art Archive, art writing is one of the predominant types of content in the materials we come across. From secondary materials such as art historical volumes and essays in exhibition catalogs, to primary materials like typescripts of exhibition reviews, drafts of lecture notes, curatorial statements, personal correspondences; the list goes on.

The Fleeting Border of Hongkongness in Hong Kong's Contemporary Art

Hong Kong Studies, 2023

This article aims to mediate the fleeting notion of the border of Hong Kong through the lens of contemporary art and the participatory creativity during recent social movements. The subjectivity of Hong Kong and its people often underpins social movements in Hong Kong after 1997, and in the past two decades is negotiated in the forms of confrontation and contention on geopolitical, nationalistic, and ethnic borders between Hong Kong and the Mainland. The social unrests indicate that nationality and ethnicity may not be the prevailing attribution for devising one's attachment to a place. The notion of identity and its boundaries are complex orchestrations that involve confounding subjective and variable aspects of humanity, such as emotion and psychological attachment. In this sense, the notion of border is a transient one, whereby Hongkongness is constantly manifested. The works of three Hong Kong artists-Samson Young (b. 1979), Luke Ching (b. 1972), and Tang Kwok-hin (b. 1983)-illustrate and mediate both the fluidity of multiple assemblages on the boundaries of Hong Kong SAR and the trans-border correlations between Hong Kong and Taiwan. The participatory creativity, namely the Lennon Wall and diverse creativity once spread across the city during the 2014 and 2019 protests, also allegorize the diverse and mutated boundaries of individuals that comprise the subjectivity of

The Misrepresentation of Hong Kongness: The Revamped Hong Kong Museum of Art

The Museum Worlds, 2020

Established in 1962, the Hong Kong Museum of Art was the first public museum in the city. It closed in August 2015 for a four-year renovation and spatial expansion of the facility, and reopened its doors in November 2019. The renovation happened precisely in the interstices of two important historical ruptures in recent Hong Kong history: the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the ongoing Anti-China Extradition Movement that started in 2019. These movements are redefining the identity of the city and its people in contrast to the conventional Hong Kong cliché of transformation from fishing village to modern financial hub. Without addressing recent changes in cultural identity, the revamped museum rhetorically deploys obsolete curatorial narratives through exhibitions of Hong Kong art. This report critiques the representation of Hong Kongness in the revamped museum and argues that the latter is a soulless entity that overlooks the fact that both politics and art are now reconstructing local identities.

Urban Art Images and the Concerns of Mainlandization in Hong Kong

Shaped in the shadow of colonialism and post-colonialism, visual arts in Hong Kong have wrestled with issues of identity, locality, and international recognition. The lengthy process of the transfer of sovereignty, initiated in 1984 by the signing of the Joint Declaration, inspired contemporary artists in Hong Kong to assert their locality. In the 1990s in particular, since the trauma of the Tian'anmen Incident in 1989, '[a] psychic decolonization occurred which marked out a distance from both of these larger contexts [Western and Chinese art] without simply denying either' (Clarke 2001: 8; also pp. 38-69). The ideological struggles were visible in architecture and offfijicial public art too, which celebrated the reunion both during and after the Handover in 1997. It can also be argued that offfijicial public art in Hong Kong to a certain extent marks an ongoing cultural mainlandization of the urban space by the People's Republic of China (PRC). But how do urban art images, such as street art and contemporary grafffijiti, survive the discourses of post-colonialism in its specifijic forms of de/recolonization and mainlandization, and debates of cultural heritage and indigenous identities? How do they engage with the complex situation? I seek to explore these questions by modifying Henri Lefebvre's (1991) defijinition of space as a continuous process in which the physical, mental, and social aspects of the space are intertwined. 1 In this process of creating the space of urban art images, we need to consider the agency of the creators of urban art images as constructors of the space and its norms, the nationality/ethnicity of the creators, as well as the contextualized formal analysis of the images and the site-responsiveness. 2 Based on intensive periods of fijieldwork research in Hong Kong since 2012, extensive 1 This approach was initially introduced in my conference paper in the Joint Conference of AAS and ICAS '70 Years of Asian Studies', Honolulu (Valjakka 2011b). 2 In order to emphasize the actual interaction between the site, the work(s) and the creator(s), and the continuous impact of this interaction on the meaning of works through a visual dialogue (where one work is created as a response to an already existing one), I prefer using the concept of 'site-responsive' instead of site-specifijic (cf. Kwon 2004/2002 and Bengtsen 2013, Bengtsen 2014. For more see Valjakka 2015c.

The Emergence of a New Public Art in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong from 1990 to 2012

The Emergence of a New Public Art in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong from 1990 to 2012, 2019

This thesis is concerned with how two main genres of public art: traditional and ‘new genre public art’ evolved in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong between 1990 and 2012 in response to political, economic, spatial, social and cultural changes. Since 1990, Chinese public art has focused on traditional forms of public art and the relationship of public art to architecture and urban planning. Unique forms of public art and architecture, I argue, have also been emerging amidst a dynamic of unprecedented rapid urbanisation and the country’s significant engagement with the global community. One example of this is the implementation of China’s urbanisation policies, which have transformed the spatial structures of Chinese cities and the role of public art in the new urban landscape. Drawing on critical perspectives from public art, contemporary Chinese art, architecture and urban theories, this thesis presents an in-depth study of Chinese public art, including the non-material production of art, which involves public engagement. The investigation of Chinese public art has resulted in an expansion of the definition of new genre public art in consideration of the peculiarities of the Chinese experience, including in politically autonomous Hong Kong. The key argument of this thesis is that the development of Chinese public art during the last two and a half decades has not been dominated by a particular narrative, ideology or mode of production but, instead, is a consequence of varying responses to government policies and the changing political, social, cultural and economic environments in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The Star and The Queen: Heritage Conservation and the Emergence of a New Hong Kong Subject

This essay analyzes a social movement seeking to preserve two piers at the financial district of Hong Kong in 2006 and 2007. I ask whether the crowd gathering at the piers and the subsequent social movement signify a moment when the floating identity of Hong Kong has finally acquired an anchor in its urban environment to claim a more rooted definition. I examine the discourses and the artistic expressions of the movement to explore how it radicalizes the issue of heritage conservation to articulate a critique of capitalism and to revitalize the decolonization project. This paper also pays special attention to an art performance piece by artist/activist Leung Po-shan, focusing on its imagination of a political community of equals and actualization of heritage meanings by highlighting a deep sense of connection to local history and identity. Arguing against Ackbar Abbas’s reading of Hong Kong culture as a space of disappearance, I maintain that the rise of heritage conservation as an important issue of social contestation indicates a meaningful change in the ways the Hong Kong identity is experienced today. It represents, in my view, a gradual shift from the deconstructionist questioning of identity to the desire for a more assertive self-definition. The movement at the piers heralds such change by negotiating, especially through its use of art, a condition of becoming that enables a different imagination of the city and the emergence of the Hong Kong people as a political subject.