Image of a City, 1990, Video, 11 min

With the rapid urbanisation of Hong Kong since the 1970s and an influx of migrants from China, how do Hongkongers perceive the changes of their city and their cultural identity? May Fung is one of the most influential video artists at the forefront of experimental practice in Hong Kong for over three decades. Her work often interweaves local history, cultural landscapes, politics and poetics. Her two works Image of a City (1990) and She Said Why Me (1989) offer images of Hong Kong through a time tunnel from the 1967 Hong Kong riots to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, with footage drawn from the Hong Kong Government Record Service. Through cityscapes marked with architectural references that reflect the parallel worlds of both Chinese and British, the artist channels her emotions and memories along the pivotal transformations and negotiations between the two cultural worlds coexisting in one city. The anxiety and frustration expressed in the works have become self-fulfilling prophecies. What the footage depicts keeps resurfacing through our timeline, as seen in the recent movements in Hong Kong and other parts of the world.

Recordings of scholar Ackbar Abbas’ lecture on the notion of ‘culture in a space of disappearance’ guides us through Image of a City (1990): “Hong Kong…has never seized being a port, a door, a threshold, a passageway. It is a space in transit. Everything is provisional, temporary and ad hoc.” Overlapping the voice of Abbas in the video is Margaret Thatcher’s speech on ‘one country, two systems’. Abbas described Hong Kong as “not so much a place as a space of transit,” whose residents consider themselves as transients and migrants on their way from China to the next place. What is disappearing? Is it something visible or intangible? Is it our heritage and identity, or our sense of belonging? Is it the memory of our past, or our imagination of the future?

I Can’t Find Myself, Most of The Time, 2020, Animation, 1 min 56 sec

Greek philosopher Heraclitus had a famous analogy about life: “You cannot step twice into the same river”, which recalls the Chinese philosophy of change in the Yijing (I-Ching or Book of Changes): the only certainty is change, as such each moment is unique. Kongkees latest animations, created in 2020, are anchored by these concepts. Time cannot travel backward, everything is always in a state of becoming. During the process of making animation, with the help of software and tools, characters can flow fluidly back and forth in time, as though existing beyond time itself. Travelling between dimensions, pasts and futures and grabbing hold of the most precious moments; however, the ending has always already been drawn out for the animation characters. In “reality” we are unable to see the future and there is no way of reading the script of our lives. We are part of the current of time. There is a feeling that our destiny, unfinished, is still to be written.

Both videos shown here are silent, focusing the viewers on the movements and visual expressions of the artist. Kongkee uses I can’t find myself, most of the time (2020) as a mouthpiece to project his state of mind. The motion and gestures of the walking man are those of a sleepwalker or someone in a state of dreaming. To the artist, dreaming also feels like walking through water. The walking man has a strong sense of direction but where is he heading? Could it be read as an analogy of the discoordination between the mind and body, consciousness and physical strength? In the water and above the surface, time is lapsing between the two realms. The work becomes a meditation for the artist to release his emotions from what can perhaps be felt – distress and powerlessness. Like a self-reflection, with his head being trapped in a box through the complex process of thinking, he does not seem to be able to escape from the situation.

On Junk Bay, The Plant, 1990-present, Video, 2 min 56 sec, with Cyanotype of plants

Law Yuk Mui’s On Junk Bay, The Plant (1990-present) leads us to revisit the geographical history and metamorphosis of Junk Bay, later known as Tseung Kwan O (TKO), an area of reclaimed land in Hong Kong where the artist used to live. The earliest inhabitants of the area can be traced back to the 13th Century, and major settlements date back to the late 16th Century when small fishing villages were formed in the area. With its geographical advantage on the opposite side of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, shipping industries emerged in Junk Bay the 1960s until 1982 when the local government began the development of TKO as a new town which saw a chain of major reclamation constructions. Notably, the government never uses the old name ‘Junk Bay’.

Law Yuk Mui’s lens not only captures the natural landscape of the area but also the history of its phenomenal land development through reclamation where foreign plants migrated, were transplanted and re-rooted. Through her investigation of Hong Kong cartography and passion in geology, the narratives delve deeper into the contemplation of migration, native vs foreign, borders and the relationship, and negotiation between human and nature.

The notion of memory is highlighted in the historic and colonial narratives in Leung Chi Wo’s video ‘My name is Victoria’ (2008). Leung’s practice primarily draws from references and archives with history as a subject matter. He often digs up small details and reveals unknown facts. Eleven years after Hong Kong’s sovereignty changed hands from Britain to China in 1997, the artist created this work in 2008 to explore the perception and interpretation of the name ‘Victoria’. This video work unveils an unfamiliar route in the city: starting from Victoria Road in Kennedy Town, the border of Victoria which was the former capital of the crown colony, to Aberdeen where the British, under the reign of Queen Victoria, landed for the first time in Hong Kong in 1841. Through an open call on the internet, the artist collected forty women’s stories about their name ‘Victoria’, which are narrated by a single female voice in a distinctive soft British accent with music by Franz Schubert playing in the background.

The light-hearted atmosphere in the video juxtaposes the heavy cultural and political issues the work is concerned with. The name ‘Victoria’ carries a majestic air and represents a time in the past in the context of Hong Kong. In these stories, one notices how different generations think about naming, and the artist’s curiosity on how a name is reinterpreted over time and across cultural beliefs. Once a foreign name is transplanted, new meanings are born. Leung brings up these multiple layers of naming with irony and wit. The proper phonetic tranliteration for Victoria in Cantonese is ‘Wai Dor Lei Nga’ which connotes a majestic and elegant air. But it is commonly written as ‘Wik Dor Lei’ literally meaning ‘Region of Profit’ which reflects certain local values and also contradicts or even ridicules the regal background of the name. How does history and the knowledge of history shape our perception and self-recognition?

MAP Office’s ‘The Book of Waves’ (2018) brings to mind the often forgotten natural geography of Hong Kong, which consists of more than 260 individual islands, though it is better known as a densely populated modern cityscape. Engulfed in the sound of waves recorded from Hong Kong’s Shek O Beach and Big Wave Bay, MAP Office’s video animation of 250 hand-drawn waves and ripples in the nihonga style takes as its starting point the ‘Ha Bun Shu’ of Mori Yuzan, an archive of waves drawn from the Edo period. To achieve the quality of an animation, the artist duo had to imagine what the missing links of waves would be in order to weave the stories together. The traditional technique of handwork merges with new technology through the form of animation. MAP Office construct their own representation of the oceans around the world, which is the core of their current research.

MAP Office (Laurent Gutierrez, b. Casablanca 1966 and Valérie Portefaix, b. Saint-Étienne 1969, both live and work in Hong Kong) is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Gutierrez and Portefaix. This duo of artists has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression. MAP Office projects have been shown in over 100 exhibitions at venues including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris) and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (Beijing), around 35 Biennales and Trienniales around the world with five contributions to the Venice Biennale in Art and Architecture (2000, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010). Their cross-disciplinary practice has been the subject of a monograph, MAP OFFICE – Where the Map is the Territory (2011). MAP Office received the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2013. Their recent research projects have a strong focus on the ocean and have been shown internationally, including The Story of Amanami, Triennale di Milano 2019; Ghost Island. inaugural Thailand Biennale 2018; Islands, Constellations and Galapagos, Yokohama Biennale 2017; Desert Islands, Singapore Biennale 2016. Their work has been collected internationally by private and private institutions including M+ Museum, Hong Kong; FRAC / Institut d’Art Contemporain (IAC), Villeurbanne, France; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing, China; Deutsche Bank Collection, Hong Kong; Momentum Collection, Berlin; MIACA, Tokyo.

Magu (2012) is a stop-motion animation set in Male, Maldives, by Yukihiro Taguchi, dealing with the objects and memories of a place of transit. Male, the capital of the island country Maldives, is a famous transit hotspot for tourists travelling to the other islands. The majority of its inhabitants consist of locals and migrants. Roaming around the island, the artist encounters the colourful island fabrics, rhizomic and absorbing imprints from daily elements of the vibrant island life and the local environment – wall textures, manhole covers, iron grills and street signs. These fabrics become records of memories and spirits of the place and people. During Taguchi’s stay, he learns from the locals that certain colours represent particular cultural, political or religious ideals and identities, and some colours should be avoided. Colours signify different cultural, social and political meanings in every culture.

Terasu is a Japanese word meaning ‘to illuminate’. In his eponymous video, Taguchi contemplates the notion of darkness and light. Invited to create a site-specific project in Arnsberg, Germany, during the winter, the artist asked himself what would the strategy be when the sky goes dark so early? Taguchi applies his survival instinct, using fire he creates by the most primitive method of hand drilling. The artist draws with the fire across the town in lines and signs, creating soul-like energies, like a magic touch harmonising the contradictory yin and yang, using fire to draw a boat and a waterscape. At the end, the fire is transferred onto torches, and the people from the town draw the signs that represent themselves and their place. These are records of the collective memories and solidarity of people.

Berlin-based Japanese artist Yukihiro Taguchi (b. Osaka 1980, lives and works in Berlin) is known for his unique performative installations and community-based projects which are composed of drawing, performance, animation, and installation. The environment and the interaction with its people are his main source of inspiration from which he interweaves the local stories, traditions, and cultures together to explore spatial experiences, energies, and values in our urban landscapes. Taguchi’s recent exhibitions include Discovery in Kanaiwa, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Japan (2019); Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale, Niigata, Japan (2018); Open ART Biennale 2017, Örebro, Sweden; Project Patch Pass at MILL6 Foundation (2016); and Yukihiro Taguchi, Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany. The artist graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Painting Department (B.A. in oil painting) in 2004.

With expertise and experience in the history of art and architecture as well as cultural management, Angelika Li is committed to engaging with the essence of local culture, heritage and valued stories, and driving a continuous dialogue between local and international communities. Li is the founder of the curatorial project HOMELAND in TRANSIT and is the co-founder of PF25 cultural projects, a research initiative focusing on the everyday life and ecologies of Switzerland and Hong Kong. In 2015, Li was the founding director of MILL6 Foundation bringing it to ICOM museum status and the Award for Arts Promotion by Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2016.