Hong Kong handover-themed exhibitions give artists freedom to explore political landscape

A group of artists have joined forces to respond and reflect on Hong Kong’s changing political scene through installations, letters, and drawings

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Imagine There’s No Countries, Imagine There’s No Heaven (2017) by Luke Ching Chin-wai is featured in the exhibition ‘Composing Stories with Fragments of Time’. Photo: Karin Weber Gallery

Published: 5:30pm, 4 Jul 2017Updated: 5:48pm, 5 Jul 2017

Plenty has been said this past week by the Chinese president, by protesters and most of all by the press about the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover. But conventional narratives leave plenty unsaid about what it feels like to live through the former British colony’s tumultuous and uncharted transition into a Chinese city. However, four group exhibitions and a new anthology of personal recollections, on show in Hong Kong, are helping to fill in some of the gaps. There are no authoritative voices and no tidy conclusions, just attempts to capture the many shades of emotion, the private fears and desires that are experienced while living in Hong Kong at this historic moment.

Tsang Tak-ping’s work, Six Scenarios of Mindful Practice: Ego-centric Suffering, Severe Attachment (2017) can be found at ‘The Talkover/Handover 2.0 exhibition’ at 1a space gallery. Photo: courtesy of the artist

The Talkover/Handover 2.0 exhibition, 1a space gallery

The first Talkover/Handover project was launched at the 10th anniversary of the handover in 2007. This year, a group of artists have again invited peers to discuss the most pressing issues of the day: art in a politically sensitive era, the rise of localism, censorship, the future of independent art spaces and labour issues in the art world.

Lively debates have been held in the weeks leading up to the July 1 anniversary but the creative side of the project – works by some of the artists involved in the discussions – has just been unveiled at the 1a space gallery in the Cattle Depot Artist Village to coincide with the big day itself.

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The works are relevant to the discussion topics but none makes overt comments. As Yim Sui-fong says, her performances and videos about identity are open to different interpretations because they are meant to encourage reflections, rather than to describe her own views. Tsang Tak-ping, a co-founder of Para Site who has become a Buddhist and a farmer in recent years, goes even further in removing traces of the artist’s intent. His Six Scenarios of Mindful Practice: Ego-centric Suffering, Severe Attachment (2017) is an installation of random objects that he put together while he looked back on his life. “There is no need to try to look for anything representational”, he says.