Kunsthalle Kowloon
Kunsthalle Kowloon is the collaborative blogging platform shared by Robin Peckham, founder of the Hong Kong gallery Saamlung, and Venus Lau, independent critic and curator.
Kunsthalle Kowloon is a 39-year initiative, beginning in 2008 and terminating at the expiry of Hong Kong’s nominal autonomy from the People’s Republic of China.
Kuntshalle Kowloon is an imagined platform for the tentative investigation of cultural production. Like the model of the kunsthalle, nothing is left behind; there is no permanent collection. Like the peninsula of Kowloon, the arrival of which at a particularly Chinese modernity turned out to be a misstep into a Hong Kong already past its golden age within a Pearl River Delta already abandoned, we have come too late. It seems that many of our heroes were, in fact, men who came too late, so let us take this as a manifesto on the virtues of coming too late, of living in a skewed temporality that displaces our innovation into the territory of the always-already. We have arrived late to the discourse of radical networking, the immaterial, the theoretical, which grants us a certain kind of freedom. Kunsthalle Kowloon is set free to believe, or to live backwards through what looks like the meta-modern: a fragmented existence without destruction marked by a cognitive mapping of the local relationships between objects.
Kunsthalle Kowloon is an attempt to trace a non-narrative geneaology of our situated present in which critical writing and other such acts of benevolent violence are treated as performative gestures immanent to the planes of production. We believe that both the critical and the curatorial are co-productions of the thing itself, operating virtually as a pessimistic extension of our actually-existing everyday. Our nostalgia for certain moments functions as a thoroughly unreconstructed pastiche: not of the sort that indulges in the indeterminate jouissance of postmodernism, but rather the quieter kind that inhabits the structures of life on a human scale offered by the simultaneous collapse of grand narratives and the increasing interconnection that accompanies the growth of the world-system. Our anti-critique lies in the friction so produced, in the figuration of the glitch, in the frame, in the borders, in the liminalities, in the happy coincidences.
The Igland Project begins where Kunsthalle Kowloon leaves off, pushing the investigation of displaced modernity from the context of greater China into a territory not restricted by traditional geography and beyond the 39-year temporal territory of peninsularity. The Igland is demoored, drifting in time and space and never afraid to leave. Following the cognitive mapping of the local relationships between objects core to Kunsthalle Kowloon, the Igland Project attempts to push forward a similar political agenda, leaving behind the aesthetic collapse of the relational–the necessary result of a politics of identity overly invested in ontology–for the task of the construction of a speaking system of objects. That is to say, the project of post-colonialism is reframed as a new approach to the unfinished utopian project of modernism itself, exploring the possibilities of alternative modernities in order to engage with the overarching ideologies that produced the imperial imperative rather than with the systems of colonialism. This ideology of modernism lies structurally within the systems of objects inherent to our work, existing through the logic of the archipelago.