Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards 2009
21 May – 1 August
Hong Kong Museum of Art
10 Salisbury Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Biennial, a name many in the local are scene are loathe to voice, fortuitously changed its name recently to the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards, announcing its set of “winning” works from a pool of over two thousand works selected with much red tape and gnashing of teeth by a committee appointed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department. The jurors for this year consisted of several notable mainland Chinese critics, specializing mostly in traditional painting, alongside cultural experts of the government department also responsible for public pool maintenance. Tellingly, few of the award winners are recognized or widely known members of the local art community, and, as it turns out, the new title appears to be a misnomer after all: traditional ink painting is actually the dominant aesthetic. Contemporary ink wash has been something of a hot topic in recent years, but none of that stylistic hodgepodge here: young painter Koon Wai-bong, for example, even titles his carbon copy compositions “Reworking the Classics” (2008) Others, like Alexis Ip Ka-wai, are recognized for straightforward documentary photography that records, unsurprisingly, disappearing street scenes across multiple images. Most egregious of all, video artist Hung Keung panders to the obvious predilection towards insular spiritual concepts with the multi-channel installation “Dao Gives Birth to One” (2009), which appears as a swirling mass of black ink that nods towards a range of concepts but ultimately demonstrates little more than proficiency in flocking animation.

Fortunately, a handful of passable projects offer relief. Kingsley Ng’s “Record: Light From +22 16’14″+114 08’48″” (2008) is indeed one of the strongest multi-media installations to be showcased in recent years, translating the visual patterns of camera flashes from Victoria Peak into the concrete music of a spinning metal disc–although one might suspect this was selected at least in part for its tourist-friendly vision of the Hong Kong skyline. Equally compelling is the photographic series “Into Light” (2008) contributed by Ho Siu-nam, depicting pedestrian underpasses as abstracted and elongated tunnels of pure light, bringing a touch of that otherwise insipid bureaucratic spirituality into composition rather than presenting it overly conceptually. Tang Kwok Hin, as has become typical, presents a theoretically-sophisticated project that certainly arouses interest but nevertheless fails to follow through visually, creating a collaged world out of Google image searches in his “Photo Book of Mu Mu Dao” (2009).

Hong Kong Diary: Response Exhibition of the 53rd Venice Biennale Hong Kong Exhibition II
Pak Sheung Chuen
12 June – 1 August
Hong Kong Museum of Art
10 Salisbury Rd., Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Pak Sheung Chuen, who represented Hong Kong at the last Venice Biennale in a well-received solo exhibition, has discovered an unlikely but shockingly effective method for dealing with the lack of institutional support for contemporary practice in Hong Kong. Invited to present a “response exhibition” at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in the wake of a similar project organized by the Arts Development Council with the involvement of his gallery, Vitamin Creative Space, at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, Pak was then informed that there would be no support available; he was to execute the entire show on his own, even if financial support for production was eventually provided by the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the ADC. Rather brilliantly, the artist responded with scathing institutional critique in the guise of community art. Installing a handful of works and archival pieces in the museum lobby, he has simultaneously avoided the tomblike and musty upstairs galleries and managed to locate his exhibition outside the paid area of the museum, completely open to the public. In order to take advantage of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows that run the length of the space and open onto unbeatably expansive views of Victoria Harbor, Pak places a few armchairs and a magazine rack facing the water, just below a large monitor replaying not video art, but rather public television clips related to his work and the Venice Biennale. To one side, a large chest of drawers contains framed and matted clippings from his work with Ming Pao, a daily newspaper for which he once contributed often hilarious but always family-friendly conceptual, textual, and graphic works on a regular basis. Similarly, a bank of almost a dozen smaller television monitors replay more clips about his practice: interviews, studio visits, and installation shots, most of which has previously aired on the major television stations in Hong Kong.

In terms of new work, a handful of low, round tables play host to a variety of goods, resembling nothing so much as the spoils of a trip to the local grocery store. Each pile is accompanied by a printed receipt with a few Chinese characters belonging to the names of products highlighted in crisp, straight lines, making reference to literary quotes, religious experiences, and political satire, among other things. These instances of incidental poetry are actually contributed by Pak Sheung Chuen’s students, quoting the artist’s earlier works like “Miracle of $132.30″ (2003), which “miraculously” located a verse from the New Testament in the day’s shopping. The works may not belong with Pak himself, but this educational lineage is certainly an element of his practice; their presence here seems to suggest an upsetting of the notion of completing yet another solo exhibition in celebration of his Venice project. This theme of museum detournement is continued and brought to a head with a number of dice in sizes varying from a half meter to a meter across, all covered in a fuzzy, bright material and emblazoned with linguistic characters (many of which would be illegible even to Chinese speakers from beyond Hong Kong). These words are derived from phrases critiquing the local government–always the subject of protest for its policies of mainland appeasement–and are intended to be rearranged by visitors and even photographed for posterity by a closed circuit camera system.

No matter that none of this would really stand up independently as contemporary art within a white cube space or in the pages of a serious scholarly catalogue; not every project by every artist should be called an exhibition, and this collection of crowd-pleasing political jokes, media archives, and lounge chairs certainly stretches the definition. It is, after all, largely wedged between an escalator and a revolving door, taking over a space that was never intended to see much activity. Pak Sheung Chuen has revitalized one of the many dead spaces that characterize Hong Kong’s public art institutions, and he has done so both tastefully and rebelliously.

A group of collaborators should be mentioned for their assistance in developing the exhibition, including: Tamshui, Anthony Yung, Lee Fung, and Wong Fung.

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.