Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

Oscar Ho Hi ng Kay Hong Kong 1997: The Politics of Curating On 1 6 September 1 996, Poon Shing Lui, an artist who immigrated from China a few yea rs ago, went to Victoria Park on Hong Kong island and poured a bucket of red paint over a nineteenth-century bronze statue of Queen Victoria . He then smashed the nose of the Queen with a hammer. The goal of his actions was to protest against a legacy of colonialism and to remind Hong Kong people of their experiences under British rule. With less than 300 days before the turnover, and the British Hong Kong government already bei ng referred to as the 'numbed duck', such action seems belated and ignorant of the cultural history of Hong Kong : the statue had been covered with red paint as part of the anti-colonialism campaign of 1 968. Such an act in 1 968 was, in fact, qu ite courageous in the context of British rulers who sti l l maintai ned and enforced a tremendous amount of power. After many years of social a nd pol itical changes, especially the gradual democratisation of the government in the 1 990s, picking on a nineteenth-century old lady seems more like the act of a pol itical bully than a liberator from colonial oppression . The incident, however, reveals interesting tensions between Hong Kong and China. A friend of the artist, a critic who also recently immigrated from China, praised the action as an 'excellent piece of art', because 'within just five mi nutes, he successfully turned a foreigner's nose i nto a Chinese one, liberating Hong Kong people from colonial culture wh ile reminding them of their return to their motherland . ' 1 A Chinese nose is to be made by smash ing flat a foreigner's nose, and to be Chinese is to be measured by the height of the nose. It is precisely this kind of thinking and rhetoric, this ki nd of re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution, which terrifies Hong Kong people already i n fear of returning to China in 1 997. More importantly, the critic's comments are typical of the lack of sensibility and understanding of Hong Kong and its people. For example, the statue no longer functions simply as a symbol of colonia lism. Many of us took pictures there i n our early ch ildhood , and later on, with our boyfriends or girlfriends, and then with the family. The symbols of power a re now somewhere else. It could be the Governor's house, or, more accurately, the Xin Hua News Agency, t he unofficial Chinese embassy in Hong Kong. The i ncident happened at a time when the so-called 'Hong Kong Spirit' was at its peak. Li Lai Shan, whom the media refers to as a 'one hundred percent Hong Kong windsurfer' , had j ust won the very first gold medal for Hong Kong at the Atlanta Olympics. A sense of 'Hongkongness' had never been stronger. Poon Shing Lui's action, unfortunately, triggered the release of repressed frustration and led to the Chinese artist being criticised as a self­ righteous bully who lacked civil sensibility. Also, the whole incident revealed a deep hosti lity toward a culture with which many Hong Kong people fi nd difficult to identify. However, whether one likes it or not, when the Sino-British agreement was signed in 1 984, the destiny of Hong Kong was fixed. Under the model of 'One Nation Two Systems' i nvented by Tang Shao Ping , Hong Kong has been guaranteed that her 'way of l ife' will remain u nchanged for fifty years. 'Ways of living' mean culture. The question is: what is this 'way of life' which makes us different? As a consequence of the Sino-British agreement, the need to identify a 'way of life' so that we can retain it becomes an urgent and important matter; it demands the confirmation of a cultural identity. I n such a context, there is defin itely a role for the curator to play. Naturally, during the past 1 50 years of colonial rule, the government did not encourage a strong sense of local cultural identity. 2 How then , can we identify and nurture such an ambiguous thing as 'cultu ral identity' before 1 July 1 997, before a much more powerful culture begins to move in? History is always a good starting point, especially when for over 1 50 years, the h istory of Hong Kong has been both intentionally and unintentionally ignored. For example , to this day Hong Kong art history remains primari ly oral and little work has been done on it. Six years ago, at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, we started our research project on Hong Kong art and had our first of a series of exhibitions under the title, 'Hong Kong Culture Series'. The first artist featured was Li Tie Fu, an artist active i n Hong Kong du ring the 1 930s a nd 1 940s. Li was the first known Chinese artist who went to the West to study Western art. 3 The exhi bition 1 00