How performance art is thriving in Hong Kong despite new laws and political climate
- The often controversial art form is proving especially popular among younger audiences, with gender, feminism and sexuality top themes
Once considered a niche practice, performance art has firmly taken root in Hong Kong and is proving especially popular with younger audiences craving real-life interaction after years of enforced virtual living during the pandemic.
This is despite Hong Kong’s new laws and political climate reducing the freedom of artists engaged in the often political art form, with practitioners in the city still finding room to express themselves in public.
In Hong Kong, the history of performance art – site-specific live performances that are often conceptual and open to interpretation – can be traced back to the 1970s, when Kwok Mang-ho, also known as Frog King, came up with the Cantonese term hak bun lum for his performative practice.
The phrase, which directly translates as “guest arriving”, also bears phonetic resemblance to the English word “happening”, which American artist Allan Kaprow came up with in the 1950s to describe different kinds of ephemeral, live cultural events.
Kwok’s hak bun lum performances made history. In 1979, he took his site-specific “Plastic Bag Project” to Beijing and Shanghai, which were the first recorded performance art events to take place in mainland China in the contemporary art context.
For decades, however, Kwok and other performance-art pioneers lived in the shadow of other artists.