Text by Robin Peckham
Now that the uproar over the ethics and funding of the “Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation” exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art has died down, we may have reached an appropriate moment to begin rational discussion about what the project accomplished, and what kind of changes it may yet bring about within the art ecology of Hong Kong. I am relatively uninterested in the dynamics between fashion (or, as we like to say in the Pearl River Delta, “business”); between Dior at the Ullens Center, the Chanel pavilion, and the Hermes pod, we have seen enough such collaborations over the past several years that no sane observer could continue to believe that such phenomena will disappear. Nor, I believe, must we continue to question their validity. Such exhibitions presuppose a model of cultural production in which the artist intervenes actively in social life by invitation and commission, an alternative to but not a replacement for the system of commercial gallery exhibition with their emphasis on the ideology of the white cube.
Instead, I am interested in a new logic of the museum that arises through the debates over the LV show, and the consequences this may hold for the development of any future exhibition spaces within the purview of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority. Here we find a model of the museum as a potential site of production with the ability to participate in the consumption of its own spectacle–a stunning development for the staid local institutional culture. The Hong Kong Museum of Art has, until recently, fit quite well within the traditional rubric of the museum: an epic but unintrusive architectural environment maintaining and displaying a permanent collection of fine art objects. It has, of course, participated in the recent culture of demand for traveling exhibitions and temporary contemporary shows, even hosting its own biennial (after a fashion).
But LVMH has brought something new: starchitecture, blue chip contemporary, corporate design, a premiere international curator, even French museum ladies–and all at the same time. Under this ecological system, a subpar exhibition space in Tsim Sha Tsui was linked to this series of international discursive constellations that literally shapes the availability of cultural capital across cosmopolitan centers. The luxury brand invaded the museum like a virus of sorts, absorbing Hong Kong’s underdeveloped exhibition culture and allowing local observers to both contribute and consume. And let it be perfectly clear that the corporate giant was not the only entity benefiting from this system.
On the contrary, a number of patterns of creativity spun off of the LV show proper. Significantly, curator Philip Tinari’s segment of the exhibition “The Hong Kong Seven,” (used here in preference to its unsavory proper name “Guests of the Foundation”) presented severally of the strongest local Hong Kong artists on a platform on a level with global contemporary art. More importantly, given Tinari’s reputation within the international world of commentary on Chinese contemporary art, these local artists are a step closer to integration with this larger system. This will weaken the unique identity of experimental culture in Hong Kong; that much is certain. But it will also allow such artists to emerge along a plane of the visible, no longer elided by their status as speaking subjects sliding between two empires.
Then there are the waves of energy thrown off by these exhibitions. Protests, performances, online videos, blogs, newspaper editorials–all contributed to the hype around LVMH in Hong Kong, providing free advertising labor for the exhibition while simultaneously importing the vocabulary of those who supposedly protested such use of the museum space into the realm of the event itself. This creates a dynamic in which speech acts ostensibly antagonistic to the phenomenon were forced into collusion by consumption. While I suspect that much opposition to the LVMH program emerges from knee-jerk imaginations of the “role of the artist,” this energy was ultimately co-opted into the production of a new model for exhibition of the contemporary.
Notably, this opposition often resulted in the creation of new artistic work, much of which continued to bear the graphical marks of the LV brand or, at the very least, mention the fact of the exhibition. Whether or not the entire episode was a “proper” use of the museum is, at this point, immaterial. What matters now is that the museum itself contributed very little towards the exhibition–and so, when artists and other critics of the project gave voice to their opinions, they in fact co-produced a spectacle of political and ethical debate that could only be consumed by the museum and its audience. The museum becomes a site by losing its custodial role, an eddy in a discursive stream marked equally by turbulence and the pleasure of observation.
If and when a contemporary art museum (or “venue with museum functions”) opens in the West Kowloon Cultural District, it can do no better than choosing such a path, abandoning its institutional authority in favor of yielding to invasion by artists, curators, and businessmen. This is, after all, Hong Kong.