ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES: New Art Perspectives of Hong Kong
Arrivals and Departures is an exhibition about Hong Kong. Taking the 10th anniversary year of the Handover of Hong Kong from British colonial rule back to China as an opportune moment to revisit Hong Kong, it brings together responses to the place by artists from Hong Kong and British Chinese artists, in the form of newly commissioned works.
For many British Chinese, Hong Kong exists as a distanced place where they have moved from or have even never lived. Historically the biggest wave of Chinese people arrived in UK in 1950s and 1960s in response to the post-war labour shortage. There are now an estimated quarter of a million Chinese people living in UK. In today’s context of cultural awareness and the colonial past of Hong Kong, the exhibition seeks to explore first generation British Chinese artists’ relationship to Hong Kong.
The context in which Hong Kong artists are working is one that has been shaped the period leading to and following the ‘97 handover. The 2003 large-scale demonstration in protest of the legislation of Article 23 of the Basic Law, which was seen as an infringement on civic freedom illustrated a shift – cultural identity in Hong Kong moved from being an issue that was examined by intellectuals to one that concerned the man on the street. A desire to create a sense of the local has also risen in recent times in response to plans for a new cultural district, West Kowloon Cultural District. The exhibition examines the way in which artists have turned their attention from political statements to explorations of their experience of everyday life in Hong Kong.
Drawing together these two contexts Arrivals and Departures suggests that a notion of place exists at many levels from the lived experience of minutiae of everyday life to a desire to connect to a distant place. Taking a broad range of inspiration as their starting points, such as family histories, urban myths and narratives, tourist imagery, cityscapes, material culture, knitted into lived experience, the commissioned works together create multiple perspectives of Hong Kong which reflect shifting identities and conditions.
In Arrivals and Departures Hong Kong is both close and far away, real and imagined, individual and collective.
Artist include: Leung Mee-Ping, Pak Sheung-Chuen, Stella So, Tam Wai-Ping, Community Museum Project, Gordon Cheung, Yuen Fong Ling, Kwong Lee, Anthony Key, and Mayling To.
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Arrivals and Departures is the first major exhibition on Hong Kong to take place in UK.
Curated by Sally Lai and Yuen Fong Ling in collaboration with Hong Kong curatorial partners Howard Chan and Siu King-Chung
Supported by Arts Council England, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and Hong Kong Economic Trade Office.