Satellite
Timelines
The aim of these smaller projects is to build different thresholds from which others may discover new ideas for future research. They also operate as standalone projects that collectively help to form the moving parts of a history of Hong Kong art.
Supported by Kwai Fung Hin Art Foundation.
This project looks at Hong Kong art through the lens of migration. Exhibition history is presented in parallel with the history of Indian sailors, Gurkhas, African businessmen, Vietnamese refugees, Southeast Asian migrant workers and other non-Chinese Hong Kongers in the city. The result is a juxtaposition that shows the impermeability of Hong Kong art to its non-Chinese communities of color and provokes dialogue about the invisibility of ethnic minorities from the Global South in the making of Hong Kong culture.
Art writing is crucial to the development and formation of an art ecology, as it shapes and records the development in both active and responsive roles. Thus, tracing the dominating or major art publications and the contributors in the course of its development enables us to gain a more holistic understanding of the art world.
My timeline focuses on Hong Kong printed art publications from the 1960s to the 1990s and researches each decade to identify any key trends and main contributors within those years. I started by gathering the major media of each decade with the resources provided in the library at Asia Art Archive and its online database. After mapping out the major publications, I observed that there are different modes of reading, which reflect a lot on the background against the art during that time.
A mapping of the pedagogical approaches of four artist educators- Law Yuk Mui, Yim Sui Fong, Michael Leung and Michelle Lee.
Since the establishment of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 1995, arts education in Hong Kong has received increased attention and support, leading to a growth in visual arts education and informal arts learning programmes in schools and cultural institutions. Local artists have often been invited to lead or participate in these programmes, and in doing so, influenced the objectives and approaches through which art is being taught. As such, we see value in studying the pedagogical interests of artist educators as a means to understanding larger ideas and themes of arts learning that have been circulating in Hong Kong.
A spatial mapping of the mobility and movement of Choi Yan Chi (蔡仞姿 b.1949), Ellen Pau (鮑藹倫 b.1961) and May Fung (馮美華 b.1952) in Hong Kong during the late 80s and 90s.
The timeline foregrounds the artists’ agency in shaping their artistic identity through building art spaces. As founders of cultural organisations, the artists exercised greater autonomy over the display and hence the production of their works. In this way, institutions acted as anchors for the artists to move around the art circle and existed as extensions of their artistic identities that correspond to the artists’ oeuvre.
This satellite illustrates the organic relationship between artist-run spaces (ARS) and pop-up art events (PAE) in Hong Kong from the mid-80s onwards.
ARS and PAE overlap one another in terms of their site-specificity, non-permanency, and focus on artists, oftentimes appearing as responses to social events. Hence it would be apt to study the interrelationship between ARS and PAE from an experiential standpoint to shed light on how artists in Hong Kong were thinking about art in relation to space, how they contrived strategies to respond to societal changes. Another goal of this research is to create a spatial experience of ARS and PAE history.