David Clarke considers how Hong Kong artists envisaged the 1997 handover, exploring various ways of expressing local identity, in this 2001 essay from the archives.
Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.
The 1997 reunification of Hong Kong and China was clearly an occasion of some historical importance. As such, it offers a useful opportunity to study the response of artists to a major socio-political event. Such investigations have been conducted before, but they have tended to be studies of events more distant in time, about which documentary evidence is more scarce. T. J. Clark’s study of Courbet and the Revolution of 1848 in Image of the People (London, 1982) comes to mind, as does Ronald Paulson’s Representations of Revolution (New Haven and London, 1983).
The transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong should be considered not simply because of its historical magnitude and temporal proximity. The event has distinctive characteristics of its own, such as the fact that its occurrence was fixed so far in advance (at least, that is, since the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984). Political events frequently cast their shadows before them, but rarely quite so far or so distinctly. Pre-knowledge made the Hong Kong handover different from the reunification of Germany or the break-up of the Soviet Union, and conditioned artistic responses to the event in a profound way. “Handover art” occurred before the event itself, for instance, not just during or after it, and artistic responses were more conscious than they might otherwise have been.
Examples of Hong Kong artworks made prior to the actual handover period, but which were influenced by its approach, as well as those which local artists produced or exhibited during the handover period itself are presented here. All the works discussed are in some way marked by a concern with temporality, either because they involved attempts to envisage the approaching future, or because they looked back towards the past. While a concern with the future was almost exclusively a characteristic of the pre-handover years, retrospection was not confined to the post-handover period, and was a prominent feature of art produced in the years immediately before the transfer of sovereignty.
Prior to the analysis of individual artworks, brief consideration will be given to the way in which events in Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China during the period between the signing of the Joint Declaration and the handover led to a crisis of political legitimacy, and thus also to challenges to the existing cultural order. During this relatively long period the meaning of the future handover was to change and become more problematic for Hong Kong people, artists included. In the face of the territory’s imminent absorption into China a greater sense of Hong Kong’s autonomy emerged, and in art this was often expressed as a sense of local cultural identity. Art about the handover was often critical art, contesting officially promulgated interpretations of the event.
A Crisis of Legitimacy: The Changing Meaning of the Handover
The Joint Declaration of 1984 set the clock ticking for Hong Kong’s transfer to Chinese sovereignty at midnight on 30 June 1997, and it may therefore be considered as having initiated a new era in the territory’s history. Despite its unprecedented nature, the agreement to hand over one of the capitalist world’s leading cities to Communist rule did not provoke widespread public opposition in Hong Kong at the time of its signing. While resentment at having one’s future decided by external parties was commonly felt, the agreement was mostly regarded as a fait accompli. In June 1989, however, after the bloody suppression of the democracy movement in Beijing, things changed dramatically. Hong Kong people took to the streets in large-scale demonstrations, and fears about a loss of freedom after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule became widespread. China under Deng Xiaoping had theretofore seemed to be on a convergence course with Hong Kong, experiencing a large measure of economic liberalization. But now memories of the Cultural Revolution were awakened.1
A consequence of this shift in local perspective was a degree of political crisis for the colonial regime: the relatively paternalistic approach practiced up to that point was no longer viable. Organized political groups with pro-democratic agendas began to appear in the territory.2 London’s response was to appoint a politician as the final British governor of Hong Kong (rather than a foreign service professional, as had previously been usual). In order to retain credibility in a suddenly politicized environment, the new governor Chris Patten (who took office on 9 July 1992) inevitably had to make concessions, and in due course the first wholly elected and more or less democratic legislature in the colony’s history came into existence in 1995. As a direct consequence of Patten’s granting of a degree of political autonomy to Hong Kong, Sino-British relations went into a steep decline, and the possibility of a “through train,” a smoothly managed transition of sovereignty, was sacrificed.
Emerging demands for greater political self-determination in the period after 1989 had parallels in the cultural arena with a growing concern for Hong Kong cultural identity. Much of this locally addressed art made use of styles and media borrowed from Western art, partly to distance itself from the Chinese media work of those artists who had gained pre-eminence in the pre-1984 period, and who mostly identified culturally with China rather than with the territory itself. Whereas these latter artists were able to invoke the resources of “tradition” (albeit that allusions to it were often anxiously combined with consciously “modern” references as earlier discussion of the art of Lui Shou-kwan and Wucius Wong has demonstrated), the more Hong Kong–centred artists lacked obvious props for use in their project of representing a Hong Kong identity. The national and ethnic narratives most commonly used in fashioning cultural identity were not available to Hong Kong–ness, and indeed were ranged against it in what had now become a fractured field of competing cultural paradigms. More oblique strategies for invoking a sense of local autonomy in cultural terms therefore came to predominate.
Past Attempts at Envisioning the Future
Uncertainty about future eventualities is an experience common to all humanity. What distinguished those in Hong Kong following 1989 from people elsewhere with similar concerns, was that their uncertainties were tied up with a certainty, namely the known date of the handover. Temporality was foregrounded in Hong Kong from the time of the Joint Declaration, everyone learning to live with an enhanced awareness of time’s passage in the form of a countdown. Rather than “passing by,” time “ran out” in pre-handover Hong Kong. A sense of an imminent ending was immensely strong—the millennium was arriving a few years early.
Although the date of the transition was fixed a long time in advance, there was, of course, no way of knowing in advance what that event would bring in its wake. Only its form was fixed and knowable, not its content. This combination of circumstances led a number of artists to produce works that might be taken as attempting to pre-envision post-handover Hong Kong, as attempting to describe it in advance in a future perfect tense.
The least interesting among such works were quasi-realistic representations such as Liu Yuyi’s Liangchen (Festive Day) of 1993–97 which can be taken as offering an official idealization of the handover ceremony itself. Deng Xiaoping, still alive at the time the work was begun, although not at the time represented, is depicted among an extensive but carefully selected group of PRC and pro-PRC political figures shown celebrating the handover.3 Like most paintings that attempt to include large numbers of recognizable portraits, this work suffers from compositional infelicities, and lack of dramatic unity. The wall of faces is awkwardly placed in front of a composite landscape background that shows both Chinese landmarks on the left and Hong Kong ones on the right. Tiananmen is clearly visible, as is the Convention and Exhibition Centre Extension in which the handover ceremony took place.
The problem of later developments discrediting a work that attempts to foresee the future is more liable to occur when that work employs a rhetoric of realism. In contrast to Liangchen, which embodied official Chinese rhetoric concerning the handover, works by avant-garde Hong Kong artists that attempted to refer to it in advance tended to avoid claiming to know fully the content of a future eventuality. This is the case, for instance, with Danny Yung’s The Star, which instead made ironic employment of Cultural Revolution (or at least Communist Chinese) references in order to allude to fears about the transfer of sovereignty. This work can be taken as wishing to mentally prepare Hong Kong people for the future by a deliberately exaggerated representation of what it might contain, while at the same time attempting to defuse apprehension through humour and ambivalence.
The Star is a 12-metre tall truncated five-point star form in red which reads ambiguously as either rising from or descending into the ground. Its temporary one-month installation in a prominent waterfront site between the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and the Hong Kong Museum of Art during January and February 1994 gave it a clear identity as an alien, invasive presence that it would not have possessed had it been exhibited in the bare white cube of a gallery space. Clearly its meaning was enhanced by its chosen site of display, but also by the time of its display. Unlike Liu Yuyi’s Liangchen, Yung’s The Star was created to be seen before the handover itself, and not afterwards. It functioned as a premonition, or a fake advance party, rather than as a commemoration.
The Star can be compared with the work of the various “Political Pop” artists from the People’s Republic, such as Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan, or Li Shan, who similarly manipulated Maoist imagery in the early 1990s.4 There is, however, a difference of intention in that the mainland Political Pop artists referenced Maoist imagery deconstructively in order to comment on and move definitively beyond a past through which they had lived, whereas Yung dealt primarily with fears concerning a possible Hong Kong future. His primary temporal reference is in a different direction from theirs.
Image: Chan Yuk-keung, Absolute Stability, 1997, mixed-media construction. Courtesy of the artist.
A related appropriation of Chinese Communist symbolism with the future in mind can be found in Chan Yuk-keung’s Absolute Stability, a wall-mounted installation included in Hanart TZ Gallery’s handover period show, Exhibition 6.30 (20–30 June 1997). The primary form of the work is taken from the same Communist five-pointed red star symbol that Yung’s The Star employs. In Chan’s case, however, the symbol is much transformed, having been constructed from wooden rulers, a reference that requires a detour into English to decode. Knives are included in the installation, seeming to support the star (and thereby perhaps symbolizing a state power dependent on violence). A deflated balloon introduces handover references, in part because it has the form of a teardrop, but also because it evokes a Cantonese idiom concerning the feeling of impotence. Language plays a part in this work as a way of producing a local meaning, of eroding the official associations of the quoted form.
Lee Ka-sing also introduced the Communist five-pointed star symbol in certain of his images (for example Yellow Star), again using visual/verbal punning to introduce a reference that is both local and personal.5 In Cantonese pronunciation (but not really in Putonghua, the official national spoken language) the Chinese character for “star” has the same sound as the last character of the artist’s own given name. Such a discovery of private meanings only apparent within the linguistic space of Cantonese reads as a defusing of an alien symbol and a rejection of the ideology it represents. Less verbal means were employed to subvert a Communist symbol in another work of the same year, The Hero Playing with a Red Rubber Band. Here Mao Zedong is represented by a statuette, of the kind mass-produced on the mainland during the days of the former leader’s cult status. Since the statuette appears to be lying flat, it reads as having been toppled, and thus as having lost its power. A residual degree of ambiguity remains, however, given both the empty or undefined nature of the background (which makes orientation unclear) and the absence of markers of scale. Instead of looking down on a small and manipulable Mao we could perhaps be in a subservient position at the feet of a large one. As with Yung’s The Star, we are offered the possibility that China’s Cultural Revolution past could be Hong Kong’s post-1997 future, even if this sense is not the dominant one here.
Mainland-trained artist Pun Sing Lui, resident in Hong Kong since 1992, also manipulated PRC symbols in works of the late colonial period produced with the return of sovereignty in mind. For example, in 1995 he created photographic images of himself wearing a jacket with the design of the Communist Chinese flag on the back, posing in front of various Hong Kong landmarks. This ironic “pre-envisioning” of Hong Kong life under Chinese rule was also present when, in the same year, he did a humorously intended performance piece (again adopting a “mainlander” role)6 in which he taught Putonghua, the national dialect, to an audience of Cantonese speakers. The texts used in his classroom (actually the gallery space of the Fringe Club) were from the Basic Law of the post-handover Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which was being promulgated at that time.
Desmond Kum Chi-keung—like many other younger Hong Kong artists—favours using installation as his medium and he frequently employs birdcages as major elements in his pieces. The keeping of birds is a popular pastime in the territory and it is not uncommon, for instance, to see men strolling outdoors, cage in hand. Kum’s use of these cages may therefore be taken as an explicitly local reference (no matter whether analogous practices exist in other Chinese communities). In the absence of a separate high art tradition, Hong Kong-ness can perhaps be more easily indexed in this way by objects from popular or material culture— a theme explored further in Chapter 3 where installation art is considered at greater length.
In certain of Kum’s works the cages enabled him to comment upon emigration (the response to fears of the approaching handover which a great many Hong Kong people made), or the overheated local housing market (which was to see a dramatic collapse of prices in the economic downturn which occurred in the period following the transfer of sovereignty). On occasion Kum stacked birdcages to resemble tower blocks, commenting on the cramped mode of living that is the norm in the territory’s high density urban areas. In Transition Space, however, the handover itself was addressed, in straightforwardly allegorical terms. Mechanical birds are represented as moving from one cage to another identical one, a clear comment on the absence of any independence for Hong Kong at the end of its colonial era, and an expression of the fear that Chinese rule would approximate to a neo-colonialism. In addition to suggesting that the future may look like the past, Kum was also attempting to specify the nature of the late colonial period in which the work was made, and to which the title referred. Because of the constitutional reforms of the Patten era, Hong Kong did briefly experience a wholly elected and more or less democratic legislature, a kind of decolonization avant la lettre which it was clear at the time would never be allowed to continue under Chinese sovereignty. The space between the two cages, in which the mechanical birds are to be found, specifies this albeit temporary experience of relative autonomy.
In political rhetoric, too, the limited degree of enfranchisement envisioned for Hong Kong in the post-handover period was frequently referred to as “birdcage democracy” (a freedom within strict limits), and the use of this term makes a politicized reading of Kum’s Transition Space easier for the local viewer to understand.7 Cages are such ready symbols of oppression or lack of freedom that they appeared in other images around the handover period as well. In fact, a remarkably similar conception to Kum’s can be seen in a considerably earlier image by Zunzi, a prominent local cartoonist whose works appear in daily newspapers as well as in weekly magazines, and who also on occasion displays his work in art world contexts. A Zunzi cartoon of 23 July 1984 shows a duck being prodded out of one cage and into another (where a material inducement in the form of some food is being offered). Unlike Kum’s work there is no attempt to specify a transition phase of illusory freedom—the two cages are linked by a caged corridor. At the time when this image was made, just prior to the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong’s future, no such temporary experience of democracy for Hong Kong people was envisaged, and an unproblematic political “through train” was desired by both sovereign powers.
Wong Shun-kit’s Waiting of 1996, as the title suggests, deals with the artist’s feelings concerning the approach of the handover. Unlike Kum he emphasized the personal consequences of this historical event, making use of self-portraiture as his means. Although made and exhibited some time before the transfer of sovereignty, this painting is set in the future, being an attempt to visualize the artist himself in the very last minutes before the handover. A calendar open at 30 June 1997 and a clock whose hands are at ten minutes to twelve make this clear. We see the artist’s head and shoulders reflected in a mirror, and can also catch sight of his hands in the foreground, at work with a drawing pad. The image seems to be making the point that creative work is the only avenue left to the artist to assert subjecthood and come to terms with an event over which he has no control. Immobility of everything but the hands is emphasized since the artist is clearly seated in a barber’s chair. Passivity is further underlined by the reflection in the mirror of two rather threatening hands (presumably belonging to the invisible barber), which approach the artist’s head. The mise-en-scène the artist has employed to convey an idea of the handover as something that is being done to Hong Kong people (and not by them as active agents of their own destiny) is indeed rather unusual. It may be more clearly understood, however, when one remembers that it is customary for Chinese people to get haircuts immediately prior to Chinese New Year, the ritual transition between old and new in the customary calendar which the handover most closely resembles.
Image: Ho Siu Kee, Gravity Hoop, 1996, mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the artist.
Whereas Wong, Pun and Yung created artworks which were intended to help visualize the transition and the changes it might bring, Ho Siu Kee took preparation one step further by inventing devices to help train himself (and by implication others) for life in the coming era. His project involved as much irony, humour and deconstructive intent as Yung’s, but differed by adopting the rhetoric of science (so closely associated with notions of smooth progress), and never made any direct allusion to the handover itself. Whereas Yung’s manipulation of a political symbol invoked the public, political realm, Ho retreated back to a concern with the body, perhaps because of a feeling of impotence in relation to broader political events.
Ho’s Gravity Hoop consists of a stainless steel hoop form and a digital print showing the artist in the process of employing it. He hangs upside-down from the top of the hoop in what looks like a topsy-turvy parody of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian man,” preparing himself for looking at things from a very different perspective. Like other prosthetic objects that Ho constructs, Gravity Hoop initially disables the body rather than extending its power. Perhaps in the longer run, however, it might aid in a somatic preparation for reversals in the world around which the transfer of sovereignty might bring.
In Walking on Two Balls a video is presented of a performance in which Ho is attempting to progress forward while balancing precariously on two ball-shaped sculptural objects he has constructed. Ho’s concern is not merely allegorical, but this work could be viewed as representing the situation of someone attempting to acquire the responsiveness and fine sense of balance required to operate in the hybrid and ungrounded cultural space of Hong Kong. Although official rhetoric from the time of the Joint Declaration constantly emphasized that “stability and prosperity” would prevail in post-handover Hong Kong (despite the anomaly of it being a capitalist city in a Communist country), perhaps keeping your equilibrium and getting ahead would in fact require special skills.
Ellen Pau’s video installation Bik Lai Chu (Dressing Room: Pledge) presented at the Fringe Club as part of the 1994 Hong Kong Installation Art Festival, has certain features in common with the two works by Ho discussed above. In her case as well there is a use of the artist’s own body within the work, a retreat to the somatic in order to comment on public or political forces beyond the artist’s control. Pau’s primary medium is video, and when using it in an installation she commonly, as with this work, prefers projection to the use of monitors. Also typical is the use of a space closed off from its surroundings, and the presentation of a single image sequence only. Her interest in the human body in motion as a subject stems from her earlier involvement with performance, and in particular with the avant-garde dance collective Zuni Icosahedron, whose minimalist aesthetic has much in common with her own. In Bik Lai Chu (Dressing Room: Pledge) Pau makes use of front and back images of her own body projected side by side. The image was recorded in the location in which it was projected, and in response to the original function of the space as a theatre dressing room she has stripped down to her underwear. The movement of the figure in the confined space conveys a feeling of entrapment, and the piece may be taken as expressing feelings about the approaching handover.
At the time of the handover the façades of many waterfront buildings in Hong Kong were covered in illuminated messages celebrating reunification. Even Jardine House, headquarters of the trading company most reviled by the Chinese government on account of its links to the opium trade, was a participant in this politic display of enthusiasm by the business community. Naturally such unnuanced optimism about the future was a target of those whose own response was more mixed, and Phoebe Man adopted the strategy of mimicry in an installation included in the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s handover show (Museum 97: History, Community, Individual, 23 June–12 July). All the local artists so far discussed perhaps envisioned the approaching handover in a somewhat negative way—Man by contrast pretended to be looking forward to it happily. She filled the entire wall-space—and even the ceiling—of a small gallery room with large-scale Chinese characters repeating over and over again the message “Wo hen gaoxing jiuqi huigui” (“I am very happy about the ‘97 return [of Hong Kong to China]”). Repetition, together with the over-exaggerated parody of enthusiasm displayed in covering every inch of available surface, works against the meaning conveyed by the words themselves. The title has some of the same qualities: 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.... An obvious insincerity works to question the supposed sincerity of other patriotic and celebratory signs we may encounter.
Image: Phoebe Man, 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 temporarily installed in the Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre. Courtesy of the artist.
From Objecthood to Subjecthood
Nationalist rhetoric tended to predominate in official Chinese interpretations of the handover of sovereignty. Since Communist ideology no longer has a widespread appeal in China, nationalism has become a unifying force, and the narrative of national wholeness recovered which the “return” of Hong Kong allowed was fully exploited in the mainland. Nationalist rhetoric was also aimed at Hong Kong during the handover, but although most people in the territory strongly identify themselves as Chinese ethnically, they also have a cultural identification with Hong Kong which makes them less susceptible to PRC definitions of nationhood. The artworks I have analysed here are expressions of such scepticism about the incorporation of Hong Kong into China, and mark out some distance from national narratives.
The very lack of a national frame for discourse about Hong Kong identity means that oblique strategies predominated in the politically sensitized art that has been discussed here, making it somewhat different from most political art elsewhere. Appropriation (of symbols or images, from either Chinese Communist or colonial sources), mimicry, fabrication, or a retreat to the private, the personal and the somatic are all strategies adopted by these artists. Reference to popular culture and lived experience on the point of disappearance has also been noted, and photography has been discovered to offer particular possibilities for this. Strategies identified in the previously discussed case of Antonio Mak have again been observed: the ironic self-consciousness and deflationary quality of his work have been paralleled, and the Cantonese spoken language, alluded to from within a visual domain, has again been shown to be an effective marker of the local. The political subject discovered in these works is not a unified, self-transparent actor. It differs for instance from the classical Marxist conception of the proletariat as the bearer of historical agency. No vision is offered of an end-point in which political struggle will be complete, and liberation achieved (independence, the characteristic goal of colonial struggles, could never have been a realistic political aspiration in the case of Hong Kong). Although looking forward to the future has been shown to be a major preoccupation of the art discussed here, the future (that is, the post-handover period) has been viewed as the potential bringer of loss, not plenitude, and this sense of loss has been the theme of much of the more retrospective art produced.
Looked at more positively, one might see these works as revealing a post-essentialist political subject of a particularly contemporary kind.8 Responding to a situation in which Hong Kong people felt they were being made the passive objects of history, these artists found a measure of subjecthood by commenting on their plight. In a world of social facts and meanings not of their own making, they nevertheless discovered effective ways of fashioning a contestatory social identity.
David Clarke is a British art historian and visual artist based in Hong Kong. He moved to Hong Kong in 1986 to teach art history and theory in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He retired in 2017 and is currently Honorary Professor in the Department of Art History at HKU. His publications include Water and Art (Reaktion Books, 2010) and China—Art—Modernity (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Hong Kong in Transition: 1995-2020 is his open access photographic archive for anyone interested in Hong Kong and its history. Solubleshark is his YouTube channel, containing amongst other things around seventy-two hours of his art history lectures. Learn more about his work through interviews in the Hong Kong Arts Development Council’s “Oral History and Archives Project.”
David Clarke, “Living in the Shadow of the Future” in Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization, pp. 38–55, 68–69. Copyright 2001, Reaktion Books Ltd. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. Also available in a US edition, published by Duke University Press.
Notes
1. The more-or-less democratic Legislative Council election which took place on 17 September 1995 did not employ a simple “one person one vote” principle. A percentage of the seats were elected in accordance with geographic constituencies in this way, but a second set of votes became available to just about anyone who wished to register as an elector in so-called “functional constituencies.” These functional constituencies had originally been created to give an anti-democratic extra power to certain small-circle business and professional groupings, but under Patten’s reforms they were greatly enlarged to enable mass participation. It should be noted that the election of a democratic legislature had no direct effect on the executive branch of government, as it would in—say—the British parliamentary system where the largest party in the House of Commons normally forms the government. In effect the Legislative Council elections were being held to elect an opposition to the government.
2. I date the crisis of legitimacy to the period after 4 June 1989, but Ian Scott, in Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1989) prefers to think of the crisis as beginning in the time when the British and Chinese governments decided to negotiate over Hong Kong’s future. Scott’s study offers a valuable close reading of the political situation in Hong Kong during the post-Joint Declaration era (as well as a detailed study of earlier periods), but does not consider artistic and cultural factors either in the government’s attempts to gain legitimacy, or in challenges to it.
3. Deng Xiaoping had expressed the hope that he might live long enough to travel to Hong Kong after it had again become Chinese sovereign territory. Liu Yuyi’s Liangchen was reproduced in the Hong Kong Economic Journal, 25 June 1997, p. 36. A colour reproduction accompanies a more recent article about Liu’s work (“Move over Michelangelo,” Sunday Morning Post, 22 October 2000, Agenda section, pp. 1–2).
4. For a discussion of the use of Cultural Revolution-era iconography by mainland Chinese artists, see David Clarke, Art and Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective (Hong Kong, 1996), pp. 236–49. Yung later changed the name of The Star to The Wishing Star (e-mail communication, 17 March 2000). Five smaller versions of The Star (each about the height of an adult) were also created. These were mobile versions on wheels and were used as props during a parade performance along the Tsim Sha Tsui East waterfront which took place on 19 and 20 February 1994, and ended in the vicinity of the large star. Since the parade began from the new Kowloon-Canton Railway terminus at Hung Hom and ended at the Cultural Centre (the site of the previous KCR terminus) it referenced the history of the latter location. Taking red star forms from the terminus of trains from Beijing to the Cultural Centre was metaphorically a taking of Beijing things to Hong Kong, a completion of a journey south.
5. A red five-pointed star also appears in Lee’s Hello, Hong Kong (1989). A visually fragmented Chinese national flag, its yellow stars clearly identifiable, is the subject of June Forth (1989), clearly a response to the Beijing crackdown. In this work the red and yellow of the flag is visually interrupted by black. Two artists whose work is reproduced in Tiananmen Memorial Art Exhibition, Washington, DC, Congressional Human Rights Foundation, 1990 also use the Chinese flag as a way of commenting on the 4 June 1989 crackdown. Vito Acconci’s China Doll Flag has a mannequin as if shrouded or smothered by a Chinese flag, and Bing Lee (a New York–based Chinese artist) employs a black version of the flag with stars in red. The four smaller stars on the flag are represented as if melting.
6. Not all artists arriving in Hong Kong from the mainland adopt “Mainlander” personas. The sense of Hong Kong cultural identity is not indigenist in nature (unlike, perhaps, the sense of local identity which has developed in Taiwan), since so many Hong Kong people have come from the mainland.
7. The “birdcage democracy” metaphor can be found, for instance, in Samantha Wong and Cynthia Wan, “Law now in a bird cage, says democrat,” Sunday Morning Post, 27 June 1999, p. 3, and Chris Yeung, “A Bird-cage democracy,” South China Morning Post, Saturday, 10 July 1999, p. 15. Kum and Pun, together with a number of other artists, put together a group exhibition in 1995 called Pre ’97 Special Arts Zone, the works in which seemed primarily concerned with responding to the rapid approach of the handover.
8. One important attempt to theorize political subjecthood in a non-essentialist manner is that of Ernesto Laclau. Although he does not address at all closely the role of the arts in the political process, his non-reductive poststructuralist conception of political agency (as developed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [with Chantal Mouffe] (London, 1985), and New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, 1990) has been of influence on the present study.
Imprint
- Topic
- Essays
- Date
- Thu, 9 Jan 2025
- Share
