Hong Kong or the history of a global art hub

Hong Kong’s art scene is far from a recent phenomenon, even if the city’s dazzling cultural transformation – catalyzed by the transition of Art HK into Art Basel’s Asian flagship in 2013 – has somewhat eclipsed the story of this city’s artistic evolution. The first art gallery operated here on Chatham Road between 1962 and 1966; run by schoolteacher Dorothy Swan, it was where artists could exhibit beyond the City Hall, one of the few exhibition spaces at the time. In 1974, a crew of University of Hong Kong students and graduates registered as the Visual Arts Society, among whom was Gaylord Chan, who had switched to art after working as a telecoms engineer for Cable & Wireless. Most artists had day or night jobs back then. Hon Chi Fun, the celebrated Circle Art Group co-founder, who recently passed away, worked for the Post Office – a remarkable fact, given the momentum of the group at the time. Between 1958 and 1971, members ‘showed over 40 times within and outside Hong Kong’, including at the 1961 São Paulo Biennale and the 1971 India Triennial in New Delhi, wrote Fionnuala McHugh in theThe South China Morning Post in 2016. Last year, Hon was celebrated in the Ben Brown Fine Arts booth in the Kabinett sector at Art Basel Hong Kong, and is being honored this year with ‘Story of Light’, a retrospective exhibition at Asia Society that will run from March 12 to June 9.

The legendary gallerist Johnson Chang opened his first space in 1977, which was followed by the opening of Hanart TZ in 1983. The latter showed the Stars Group in January 1989 – a radical and historically important faction of artists that had been formed in Beijing a decade earlier. In 1993, Chang organized ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’ with the epoch-making critic and curator Li Xianting – considered by many as the first major collection of Chinese experimental art to exhibit outside the country, when it traveled to Australia and the United States after its Hong Kong launch. This historic exhibition has ‘maintained a continuing dialogue’ between Chinese art and the world ‘ever since’, to borrow Chang’s words, the recent Guggenheim show ‘Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World’ being a case in point. It was around this period, in 1986, that Videotage, one of the first non-profit institutions to specialize in new-media art in Asia, was founded by a group of artists. A Unesco-listed media art organization, Videotage is now located in the Cattle Depot Artist Village, a former colonial slaughterhouse in Kowloon that was converted into a dedicated artist zone in 2001, where 1a Space, a non-profit organization founded in 1998 by a collective of art workers, is also housed.

The trend of artists founding spaces is a defining characteristic of Hong Kong’s art scene. Take Para Site, now one of the preeminent non-profit institutions in Asia, which was founded in 1996 – a year before the Hong Kong handover – by a group of artists. Until the beginning of March, Para Site is honoring Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau – a cofounder of Videotage and participant in the exhibition for Hong Kong’s debut pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 – with a retrospective. Following on from Pau’s exhibition, the institution’s annual – and unmissable – spring group show, ‘Opera of Animals’, will open. Using the format of opera, in both the eastern and western traditions, it will explore staging rituals and how they mediate rational and irrational fears surrounding social conditions, past and present. The exhibition is the precursor to a partnership between Para Site and Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, which will be unveiled this summer. 

Art developments and districts have emerged throughout the city, from the Fotanian industrial zone, which has been home to an artist community since the early 2000s, to the South Island Cultural District and the relatively new H Queen’s complex in Central, where a slew of blue-chip dealers, including Lehmann Maupin,  Pace,  Gagosian,  White Cube, and David Zwirner, are setting up outposts. Homegrown galleries such as Galerie Ora-Ora and Pearl Lam Galleries are raising the bar with diverse and distinctive programs. Gallery EXIT recently marked 10 years in business with ‘Shek-O Sublime’(until March 9), a beautiful celebration of the village of Shek-O – and the paintings that the artist Luis Chan created there – in the form of a group show of 24 artists who were invited to spend time in the village. Blindspot Gallery, founded in 2010, is located in the gallery-rich industrial zone of Wong Chuk Hang, where the legendary Spring Workshop operated between 2011 and 2017. Recent exhibitions include ‘Is the World Your Friend?’ (until March 9), a solo show by Berlin-based Hong Kong artist Isaac Chong Wai. His work Rehearsal of the futures: Police Training Exercises 1 (2018) – which saw black-garbed performers restage violent clashes between riot police and protestors as sensual embraces – was featured in the opening program of the Times Art Center Berlin, a non-profit art institution founded by the Guangdong Times Museum in July 2018. ‘Is the World Your Friend?’ will be followed by ‘Saan Dung Gei (Mountain Hole Notes)’, an exhibition of contemporary landscape paintings by original Fotanian artist Lam Tung Pang, curated by Abby Chen (March 26-May 11).

Among the recent additions to the city is Empty Gallery: founded by Stephen Cheng in 2015, it’s a black box that provides a platform for audiovisual and non-object-based art. Last March, it staged Xavier Cha’s first solo exhibition in Asia, ‘Ruthless Logic’, which featured a moving-image work of two martial artists duking it out in a dreamscape, produced at Hong Kong’s historic Shaw Studios, which was founded in 1958 by the Shaw brothers and once the world’s largest privately owned film studio. This year, Empty Gallery will participate in Art Basel Hong Kong for the first time, showing works from between 1984 and 1997 by veteran 1980s New York artist Tishan Hsu, who will also present his first solo gallery exhibition of new work in more than 20 years at Empty Gallery’s 4,500-square-foot Aberdeen space. Parallel to Hsu’s show, Empty Gallery will spotlight a new body of work – an experimental film and installation – by Cici Wu, in a separate solo show ‘exploring themes of rootlessness, cultural amnesia, and the ambiguity of national belonging’, reads the press release.

Hong Kong’s artists have been steadily making waves, and history, amid these decades of growth. In 2011,  Lee Kit, who represented Hong Kong at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, became the first Hong Kong artist to show in the Statements sector at Art Basel, when he was featured by  Osage Gallery, the first Hong Kong gallery to show at the Swiss fair. The artist has gone on to enjoy a phenomenal international career, with recent solo exhibitions at Hara Museum in Tokyo, OCAT Shenzhen, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and S.M.A.K. Ghent. Edouard Malingue Gallery, which opened in Hong Kong in 2010, has contributed to the international rise of Wong Ping, whom the gallery featured in the Nova sector at 2016’s Art Basel Miami Beach, and who was, last year, included in the New Museum Triennial and the Guggenheim New York show ‘One Hand Clapping’. His solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, ‘Golden Shower’, runs until May 5.

The city’s burgeoning institutional scene has also come a long way, with the refurbished Hong Kong Museum of Art set to be relaunched in mid-2019, and the opening of M+ Museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District scheduled for next year. The M+ Pavilion will be staging exhibitions in the meantime, and its current show, ‘Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint’, pairs works by Vo with historic pieces by the renowned Japanese-American modern sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, co-curated by M+ deputy director Doryun Chong, and on view until April 22.

Inaugurated in 2018, Tai Kwun Contemporary (TKC) has been a wonderful addition to Hong Kong’s cultural landscape, and is housed in the former Central Police Station compound on Hollywood Road. TKC hosted Cao Fei’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Asia last September, organized by Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. The show centered around a newly commissioned film, Prison Architect (2018), which draws on Tai Kwun’s history as a colonial prison, thus honoring its ghosts. TKC’s programming continues with two ongoing exhibitions, which include ‘Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close’ (until April 21), a co-production between Tai Kwun’s art and heritage teams that explores the history of plague and contagion in Hong Kong, and is part of a broader international project presented by London’s Wellcome Trust. ‘Performing Society: The Violence of Gender’, presented by Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst and curated by its director, Susanne Pfeffer, is the other (until April 28). TKC has hit the ground running with exhibitions that reflect on the complexities of Hong Kong, a place where past and present, not to mention local and global, intersect in often-challenging ways. 

Stephanie Bailey is curator of Art Basel's Conversations program in Hong Kong. She is a contributing editor to Art Papers and LEAP, Ocula's editor-at-large, and a member of the Naked Punch Editorial Committee. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Stephanie writes regularly for Artforum International, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. 

Top image: Xavier Cha, Ruthless Logic, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong. Photo by Michael Yu.