A Museum of the Future on the Streets of Hong Kong
From participatory curation to guerrilla archiving, Hong Kong is carving new paths for cultural exhibition
This article is a dispatch from the Occupy Central / Occupy Hong Kong protests as experienced from October 10–13 by Adriel Luis, an artist and the Curator of Digital and Emerging Media at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
It was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2014 issue of The Asian American Literary Review: Speak No Evil.
“Do you understand that I need to take this route because Hong Kong is going through troubling times?” the driver asked me in Cantonese, as our taxi meandered through the side alleys of Hong Kong Island. It was Friday October 10, and the government had just canceled the talks it had promised to activists who spent the previous weeks engulfing the streets and headlines with demonstrations. I had made the last-minute decision to hop over from Seoul where I was amidst a study on Asia’s alternative exhibition methods. My next stop was supposed to be the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in Japan, which was themed Panorama of the Nextworld: Breaking out into the Future. But as excited as I was to see all the work there, in its sci-fi/fantasy/post-apocalyptic glory, I realized that what was bubbling in Hong Kong was also an exhibition about an imagined future. But this one was too tangible, too close – both in proximity and in heart – to miss. The Japanese robots of Fukuoka would have to wait. “Yes,” I said, nervous that a longer response might illicit a heated argument with a potential Beijing supporter who I’d only be able to debate with a 2nd-grade vocabulary. “As long as you understand,” said the driver as he turned up the radio.
Hennessy Road, the street that runs through the island like an artery, is usually carpeted by vehicles. But for the past few weeks, it had been blocked off and replaced by a sea of people, tents and art in the name of free elections. After dropping my bags off at the hotel, I trekked the road briskly, trying to pick apart why I was so nervous. My official reason for the trip was as a curator – to investigate how Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok, the main protest sites, also doubled as museums of sorts. The guerrilla art, interactive platforms and mobile classrooms that have sprouted throughout Occupy Hong Kong mirror the visions of traditional museums which are trying to reinvent themselves.
But my personal reasons for being there were harder to put into words. Yes, my family’s from Hong Kong, but I was born in California. My Cantonese is only useful in restaurants. I’ve only been there enough times to know where to get the best custard tarts and milk tea. So why did I feel something different – maybe even more visceral – while watching these protests from afar, than I did when seeing movements in other countries, or walking through Zuccotti Park during Occupy as a New York resident? Just because I’m Hong Kong in my blood, did that mean that this movement was something that I could or should be a part of? Or was I no different from the other foreigners who were taking selfies by the Umbrella Man sculpture?
My existential musings were halted by a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry sir,” a woman said in Cantonese, “but we don’t want people to take photos of these tents. You can take pictures of these art pieces over here though…would you like some water?” She led me to a cluster of hand-drawn posters, organized like a small alter with several other people surrounding and snapping shots. It was positioned along Hennessy’s median – a wall that stretched the span of two subway stations, completely consumed by art. Next to the group of sketches was another set of posters protected by a curtain of saran wrap, donning flags from different countries and notes of support from them. Further down the street was a collection of a kindergarten class’ drawings of a democratic Hong Kong. Mini-exhibitions. I had found what I was looking for.
To compare Occupy Hong Kong to a museum might seem like a trivialization. It invokes a sense that all the efforts of Hong Kong’s people in its streets can be described simply as something to be gawked at, put on display for people like me to muse over. Maybe this is because museums tend to be perceived as zoos of things, or worse, zoos of people. But I believe museums can be so much more than that – when done right, museums can help us not only better understand a culture, but how we in our increasingly global ecosystem can support the ideals of a people. I believe that curators can be a form of activist, that exhibitions can be a form of demonstration.
So while my past visits to the Hong Kong Museum of Art left me disappointed by the scarcity of local artists, and while Hong Kong’s upcoming museum complex, M+, scratches its head over what groundbreaking technologies can help it become a haven for both local culture and global appeal, Occupy Hong Kong fulfilled what its country’s museums have historically been unable to. Without ever intending to be a museum or a gallery, Hong Kong organically curated three of its central hubs as a message of local aspiration that reverberated to the rest of the world. If national history museums are known as ivory towers where intelligentsia determine the past’s canon behind closed doors, Occupy Hong Kong is a future museum built through public participation and transparency.
Unfortunately, this went over the heads of most of the press, which remained obsessed with watershed moments that might mirror Tiananmen in ‘89, or how tidy the occupiers were. Like coverage of other protest movements, Occupy Hong Kong’s coverage focused on the dramatic, tragic and peculiar – not quite words that come to mind when people think about walking through the quiet halls of your typical gallery. In fact, during the days leading up to the reinvigoration of October 10, news outlets were reporting that the movement was pretty much over. “More onlookers than occupiers onsite now” one journalist tweeted, implying that Occupy Hong Kong had dwindled into a caricature of itself.
But if we imagine the occupiers as hosts, and the onlookers as engaged and participating visitors, we see a much different picture – not a dwindling movement, but rather a new normality. In fact, the notion of tens of thousands chanting for democracy for weeks on end seem unsustainable and one-dimensional compared to the environment that was established when the cameras stopped rolling. After the police clashes, the megaphone speeches and barricade-building, remained a landscape where thousands of people were creating, organizing and exploring a range of art pieces all telling a story of Hong Kong’s present disposition and future potential.
At the center of Admiralty, where the towering Umbrella Man was erected during the height of the protest’s first wave, an overpass was converted into a multi-purpose exhibition forum. The wall along the ground offered space for artwork ranging from mass-productions of quick sketches to posters that looked like they could have been produced by a professional design firm. Leading up the escalator, a space dubbed “Lenin Wall,” boasted an illustration of John Lennon and encouraged the public to write and post their visions for Hong Kong at one of the many stations equipped with Post-It notepads and markers. As a centerpiece, a large projection above displayed encouraging notes submitted online by people from across the world. On the overpass itself, young activists led workshops for origami-style umbrellas, drawing everyone from press to small children to add to a string of hundreds of paper sculptures that had already been made. Just steps over, gigantic hand-painted banners hung over the rail, acting both as monuments for the moment and as the subjects of the most iconic photos in the news worldwide. While my arrival early that evening was greeted by fiery speeches denouncing the government’s failure to meet its promised talks, by midnight the tone transformed into melodic testimonials of memories and visions of an ideal Hong Kong – less a soapbox and more an open mic.
By the time I visited Causeway Bay the next day, the crowd had subsided, but the roads remained blocked. Upon exiting the subway, I was greeted by a massive installation comprised of a sculpture of a teargas canister, spraying out a swarm of umbrellas. Next to it, a pile of paper statues of an umbrella-weilding protester. While they had been previously assembled to stand as an army, someone had ransacked the installation, leaving them scattered and broken. The artists who had produced the works tearfully salvaged what they could, and sketched a note about what had happened to the piece next to the remaining broken bodies before walking away. A few minutes later, a new crowd approached, read the note, and crouched down to continue repairing the installation. As I watched, the term that kept echoing in my head was “national treasure” – a concept used often back at work at the Smithsonian, reserved for items like the Hope Diamond and the Star-Spangled Banner. Kneeling down to tape the cardboard pieces back together, I wondered – how will history remember these pieces? Could what’s seen as guerrilla vandalism today be valued as artifacts of Hong Kong’s new era tomorrow?
My short weekend in Hong Kong was filled the kind of cultural engagement I crave back home working as a curator. From the print-out memes that turned walls into real-life Tumblrs, to the mobile classrooms where volunteers taught curious audiences the Latin roots of the word “democracy,” entry points were offered for those who were pitching their tents for the long haul, as well as someone like me – a third culture kid just trying to figure out why this movement resonated so much.
As I write this, the roads are still closed. Hundreds of doctors have allegedly compared the blockades to cancer. Economic forums continue to wonder about the financial ramifications of a longterm protest in the “Pearl of the Orient.” I doubt this is what my colleagues in the museum world mean when they say they want to be “disruptive.” But there’s no denying that, regardless of whether Occupy Hong Kong realizes its envisioned future, it has already made history. There are some who have recognized this, and are preparing for the inevitable takedown of the movement’s iconic artwork by capturing hi-resolution images of Lenin Wall and planning guerrilla-style recovery of the Umbrella Man. That Hong Kong’s museums have remained silent throughout the protest and to requests for them to archive these works is an illustration of the divide not only in Hong Kong’s political ethos, but of its cultural preservation. Even if Occupy Hong Kong’s activists have yet to win the right to select its national leaders, it has already been ordained the responsibility of cultivating its emerging history.
Afterword: I returned to Hong Kong in March 2015 for Art Central and Art Basel in Hong Kong. I was interested in seeing if the recent events in Hong Kong infiltrated the art world. While there was one installation in Art Central that directly addressed the Occupy movement, there were few other connections in the festival. However, the Hong Kong gallery Para Site notably opened in its new venue with the exhibition, A Hundred Years of Shame — Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations. The opening of the exhibition coincided with the art fairs, undoubtedly in response to the recent events.
