v-artivist

The bottom-up democratic pursuits that have gradually shaped up the civil society in post-colonial Hong Kong – mechanically defined by the transfer of its sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 – largely began with a series of resistance movements against the demolition of public and residential spaces in the early and middle 2000s. Among these, key incidents including the preservation of the Start Ferry Piers and the Queen’s Pier (2006-07) and the old Lee Tung Street (2003-08) have not only cultivated the pivotal values and ethics of spatial justices but also woven concerned citizens across popular and cultural-elite classes into a sustainable network of collaboration and mutual care. 

In this process of constructing the post-colonial spatiality of Hong Kong, visual campaigns, perceptual knowing, and affective appeals are so omnipresent that it is hardly a coincidence that socially engaged art in Hong Kong has arisen and grown with these spatial contestations. Among such art initiatives, the non-profit video collective v-artivist (since 2007) is the most dedicated documenter and fermenter of grassroots strives for spatial rights. By promoting affordable, lens-based media for visualizing, critiquing, and contesting top-down urban renewals among grassroots citizens, the group has built up for disfranchised individuals and families an urgently needed platform for voicing their deeply felt sorrows and long-lasting love for their symbiotic life with city spaces, living, breathing, and dying. These oral histories are featured in a collection of films, compiling the DVD boxset displayed in the exhibition, that were made with the residents affected by the land and property expropriation in Lee Tung Street, the two piers, Choi Yuen Village, Sham Shui Po and Cheung Sha Wan, To Kwa Wan, and Kowloon City. 

Accompanying these archival materials, two short videos from the series “Five Elements of the Old District” and “Chak Nei Lo Mei” as well as two animation pieces are selected to exemplify the experimental films v-artivist has been producing and circulating among the wider public through community screenings and online media in recent years. Contrary to a simplified discourse of localism, they demonstrate that spatial preservation cannot be boiled down to a symbolic cultural politics that, by clinging to the colonial legacy of what Ackbar Abbas terms as “democratic trappings”^[1] embodied by iconic sites and buildings, narrowly defines Hong-Kong-ness as the counterimage of nativism invoked by governmental apparatuses to facilitate the city’s integration into China. Rather, what is at stake is the bottom-up production of mundane spaces, supported by a guerrilla model of art practice, that refuse to be physically obliterated and aesthetically degraded by a neoliberalist economy fueled by constant destruction and rebuild.

Woodstock in Spring: An Arts Festival Among the Ruins

In late 2008, the HKSAR government announced the land resumption of Choi Yuen Village in Northeast New Territories (N.T.) planned for 2010 to make space for “an emergency rescue station and stabling sidings”^[2] of the Guangzhou–Shenzhen–Hong Kong Express Rail Link (XRL). With the experiences and values inherited from the preservation campaigns at the two piers and several old districts, local activists – including mainly the post-80s generations – and affected villagers responded to the plan by launching the Anti-Hong Kong Express Rail Link movement.^[3] Apart from concerns over the livelihood of the villagers, the fragile rural ecology in the N.T., the highly questionable site selection, and the huge funding required for the money-pit project, the movement was also motivated by an awareness that the XRL would accelerate the dissolution of administrative and territorial borders between Hong Kong and mainland China.

After two years of largely unfruitful protestations spanning from the village to the city centre, the movement redirected its goal from preservation to continuous fights over fair compensation and sufficient time for relocation.^[4] Yet, at this moment of limbo, it pinnacled in an art festival titled “Woodstock in Spring: An Arts Festival Among the Ruins” that brought thousands of citizens to the village space during the third and fourth days of the Chinese New Year, 2011. The event was staged collectively by more than a hundred artists, musicians, students, and writers, who offered various forms of participatory projects including concert, ritualist ceremonies, flee market, on-site installation, and photography exhibitions to the attendees who scavenged for cultural treasures left in the village then half-evicted. Archival materials of this fleeting moment show that an alchemic transformation was at work to turn the site of political convulsion into a terrain of hard-won cultural dignity. 

Woodstock in Springs stands for a festive model of socially engaged art, not infrequently observed in post-colonial Hong Kong, that effectively re-engineers the politics of affects. It implies that which art may achieve whereas direct activism fails to is sustainable cultural production. As local writer Tse Ngosheung reflects in the documentary publication accompanying the festival, happiness is more constructive than anger as the mood of resistance for it can lead to a cultural renewal beyond specific political claims.^[5] Looking back at the festival, it marked a turning point since which the younger generations in Hong Kong have been cultivating a more ecological life economy in the rural. 

Woofer Ten

In 2009, a group of Hong Kong artists and curators founded the nonprofit organization Woofer Ten (2009-2015) when granted the managerial rights of the storefront space of Shanghai Street No.404 by the Art Development Council who, in every two years, openly called for runners of the space that had by then been operating as a white-cube gallery.^[6] Dissatisfied with the lack of interaction between the art space and the surrounding grassroots neighbourhood of Yau Ma Tei, Woofer Ten began their work by turning the storefront into a “community centre” which offered, instead of social services, a platform for the creative expressions and communal alliances among grassroots residents. 

Locate at central Yau Ma Tei, where micro-economies, traditional lifestyles, and community networks were threatened to be taken over by chain stores and the hegemonic real estate business since the foundation of the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) in 2001, Woofer Ten inevitably wrapped its project around a spatial thinking that combines the democratization of art with a search for counter-strategies of spatial production from everyday life wisdom of the popular class. This approach is most saliently observed in its curatorial project “Yau Ma Tei Self-Rescue Project & Demonstrative Exhibition” (2012), carried out at the imminent reclaim of twenty blocks at the joint of Reclamation Street and Shantung Street in Yau Ma Tei,^[7] and Woofer Post, a monthly community newspaper that both documented Woofer Ten’s activities and communicated discussions of urban renewal controversies.

As indicated by the Chinese original “活化廳” of the transliterated title Woofer Ten, it was the undergirding methodology of the organization to revitalize old districts through creative means. By mocking the name of the URA, it pitted against the rhetoric of preserving historic sites and improving urban living that had been easily invoked by the governmental apparatus to facilitate property expropriation and land recommodification through justifiable violence. Alternatively, Woofter Ten tried out the potency of longitudinal, community-based socially engaged art in resuscitating old districts. By fostering heterogenous spatial practices such as cooking, craftsmanship, screenings, urban farming pedagogies, exhibitions, and spontaneous curatorial programs in response to current social incidents, it redistributed the spatial order of Shanghai Street and the larger area of Yau Ma Tei to establish a collective usership of urban space.