Partial Recall: Art HK and Global Art, Year Zero

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.”

Critique d’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

World Art , 2015

Compared with other ‘peripheral’ art, exhibitions of Asian art in the United States remain depoliticized and unscrutinized. This essay examines recent exhibitions against the long trajectory of collecting, classifying and displaying Asian art in the US, and argues that, despite their efforts to venture beyond conventional museology, art institutions today still tend to prioritize poetics over politics, ‘tradition’ over modernity, homogeneity over heterogeneity. Such lingering Orientalism can be attributed to reasons ranging from logistical difficulties to conflicted interests, but above all to a lack of historicity: the intentional or habitual shunning of contextual complexities, the inclusion of which may deprive the artworks – and their hosts – of their pretense to neutrality, transcendence and aura. The critical approaches taken by contemporary Asian American artists and curators, on the other hand, are also fraught with contradictions and ambivalence, but they point to more historicized, nuanced and illuminating ways to display Asian art. Contemplating the unexplored directions and hidden connotations of Asian and Asian American art exhibitions in recent years, this essay contends that restoring and explicating historical specificity is crucial for building and propagating meaningful accounts of world art history, in which issues such as the appropriation of as well as resistance to modernity, the migration of objects, personae and techniques, and the experiences of the global diaspora can serve as governing themes and guiding principles, replacing a taxonomy based on nationality, ‘culture’ or chronology. Those accounts of world art history are destined to be fragmentary, yet only through such stories can we envision substantive (if ephemeral connectivity)

This essay reviews the book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents edited by Wu Hung and published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010, as part of an ongoing series aiming to introduce art critical texts produced in non-mainstream art locales to an English-speaking audience. Gathering a large number of translated critical essays, the book outlines the production of Chinese Contemporary Art since what is normally accepted as its onset in the late 1970s. This essay argues that this process of definition, legitimized by the prominent publisher of this book, amounts to a form of canonization performed at the expenses of other contemporaneous artistic forms—ink and academic painting—whose culturally and historically specific nature de facto excludes them from a concept of art globalization still largely determined and rooted by Euro-American modernism.

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.

A review article originally published online in December 2015. The website is currently under re-construction.

Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making, 2014

If Asian art of the 1990s offered glimpses into the shifting conditions of Asian societies, especially those of newly industrialised, globalising status, the essays gathered in this collection suggest that art at the turn of the century was poised to take on a different project. They collectively ask what are we to make of this newly changed Asia, for the present and for the future, for Asia itself and for the world? Miwa Yanagi, Yuka from My Grandmothers series 2000; C-print between plexiglass; 160 x 160 cm.

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.