CONVERSATIONS: Robin Peckham on Hong Kong’s October Contemporary, “Constructing a Future”

With Hong Kong’s October Contemporary now at the midway point, Robin Peckham offers a reflection on this year’s edition, looking closely at two smaller events that reveal some of the strengths and weaknesses of the current Hong Kong art scene.

October Contemporary: Constructing a Future

The last two instances of October Contemporary, during which Hong Kong art spaces, galleries, and other organizations nominally unite to provide the city with well-conceived exhibitions, lectures, and performances throughout the month, served as excellent barometers of new directions in the local art scene. Now past its halfway point, October Contemporary 2009 does not disappoint. It is heartening to see how much the regional art infrastructure has developed just over the last few years, spurred on by the general market boom and an infusion of talent and interest from the mainland; unfortunately, the immature pockets of this developing system are also painfully obvious.

To begin with, standards of exhibition and installation quality continue to be raised largely by the few organizations with the knowledge and resources to operate on a truly international scale: Para/Site, for example, presents a group exhibition of Spanish artists, while Osage, especially laudable for its contribution to the Kowloon scene, presents both a survey of young Japanese artists and experimental media work by local practitioners. These organizations seem to have really hit their stride, and this year the rumours of expansion by the former and increased international engagement by the latter seem particularly poignant. The triumphs and disappointments of the Hong Kong art world, however, may be more easily visible in the wildcards, the smaller and more insular spaces that are often left off of the international art map.

1a Space in the Cattle Depot Artists’ Village is currently hosting an exhibition entitled “Green: Through the Kai Tak River,” curated by Wallace Chang and Choi Yan Chi with the participation of Tse Yin Mo, whose last project provided an insightful analysis of divergent growth models of creative communities in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Singapore. In the current exhibition, this remains precisely what “Green” does best: cultural analysis that belongs to art only in the widest interpretation of the term. The exhibition at 1a Space is premised upon a bureaucratic event through which the Kai Tak Nullah, a drainage canal bordering the old airport, was renamed the Kai Tak River. This act is definitively the most interesting element of the entire constellation of practices crystallized in the exhibition, which also presents a range of fascinating research carried out by the curators, artists, architects, activists, and other collaborators. This body of work proposes a model for the urban revitalisation of the Kai Tak River area, offering possibilities for physical design, zoning, a market structure, activities, and a number of other elements.

The only problem is that this research, present in the gallery space as five binders of textual material and a small catalogue, vastly overshadows the art. The exhibition itself is situated within the wider Kai Tak River project as an experiment in the interaction between art and urbanism, environmentalism, and bureaucracy; in this, it fails. Some pieces, like the soundscape prepared by Anson Mak or the GPS-driven choreography from Alessandro Carboni, are the innocent victims of a sloppy and unprofessional installation; others simply add nothing to the poetic descriptions and vivid visualizations of the groundbreaking urban planning materials offered by the research end of the group. All the common cliches of environmental and “community” art seem to be compressed into a handful of derivative work burdened with indulgent and overbearing explanations.

The project is certainly an interesting one, and it is refreshing to see artists and curators devoting energy to this kind of research-based analysis–something far too uncommon in the greater Chinese art world. Unfortunately, Hong Kong alternative spaces have not yet figured out how to harness this interest in political life into theoretically rigorous artistic practice or professionally curated exhibitions. Several commercial galleries, however, seem to be finding this balance between local energy and international quality much more easily, perhaps by virtue of their distance from the all-consuming clutches of the creatively illiterate Arts Development Council. In particular, relative newcomer Gallery Exit–located in a closet-sized space north of Hollywood in Sheung Wan–has proven itself able to thrive commercially while presenting a range of exciting work by some of the best young Hong Kong artists.

This October, the gallery has invited Kwan Sheung Chi to present a handful of recent pieces under the title “No matter, Try again, Fail again,” culminating in an auction of a contract in which the artist agreed to refrain from selling any work for a period of three years. The anxiety towards the tension between market activity and local politics is clearly present again here, and this particular stunt may not be the most mature work on view, but it certainly gestures towards the emphasis on conceptual materiality present in much of the artist’s oeuvre. In the remainder of the videos on display, he variously drinks himself into a stupor while visiting a chain of gallery openings, ashes his last cigarette on his own finger, and commits suicide in 26 different ways from A to Z. The references here are many, ranging from landmark American video art to work emerging from other studios in Fotan–this is a richly situated practice that neither shies away from social engagement nor isolates itself from a broader conversation. The best work in the exhibition, however, may seem the most innocuous: a series of videos and installations tied together by the concept of thread. In one video, the artist spends 43 minutes and 43 seconds tearing a short pieces of thread; in a performative sculpture, he unravels a massive knot of the material.

It is here, in the subtlety offered by the vagaries of media imbued with conceptual import, that the overly discursive curatorial research at play in 1a Space should seek its substance–perhaps here we could find a way through the larger cultural impasse wrought by the auction houses, Donald Tsang, Sunday painters, and the West Kowloon Cultural District. Despite the high degree of interconnection through social and creative networks, synergy seems to be emerging only slowly. There may not yet be much of a finished product in terms of the emerging cultural ecology showcased by October Contemporary, but this process of experimentation nevertheless offers a fascinating counterpoint to the repeated collector-driven bubbles of the mainland China market. Indeed, during the fall auctions coinciding with the festival, many critical observers were disappointed that stronger conceptual work fell flat while the same old highly aestheticized painting was driven to new records. One may hope that it is simply a matter of time until Hong Kong accumulates the capacity for expertise and exchange necessary to transform itself into a cultural hub to challenge mainland dominance in its own right; the next major test, of course, will be the highly anticipated art fair next spring.