Culture, Identity Politics, and Postcolonial Spatiality in Hong Kong: A Socially Engaged Art Perspective

Art-historical research in recent years has attributed the emergence of socially engaged art (hereafter SEA) in Hong Kong in the early 2000s to the convergence between urban spatial movements and art activism.^[1] Grounded in this context, my MPhil research highlights how urban spatial politics has shaped Hong Kong SEA and, in turn, in what ways SEA has nurtured the bottom-up production of urban spaces differentiated from top-down planning.^[2] This essay, by introducing my previous findings into a discussion of Hong Kong’s postcolonial transition, explores some key dimensions in which the pair-up of SEA and geospatial struggles has contributed to Hong Kong citizens’ search for cultural and political selfhood. 

To frame post-coloniality within the current discussion, this introduction briefly sketches the problematics of Hong Kong’s postcolonial condition and my proposition to approach it from the vantage point of cultural and identity politics. Firstly, unlike many postcolonial cities, Hong Kong’s dislodgement from imperial colonialism was marked by, rather than decolonial revolts, the smooth transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong (hereafter the Handover) from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 without citizenship-level participation. As an anomalous yet exemplary case, Hong Kong demonstrates that any constructive discussion of the “postcolonial” should treat the concept as, rather than a historical watershed, a state of politics, or a sovereign subject, a conceptual framework whereby subaltern knowledge-making challenges colonial legacies.^[3] Secondly, currently a special administrative region of China, discussions of Hong Kong’s postcolonial knowledge production tends to be more constructive on the level of cultural and identity politics than political or territorial sovereignty.^[4] Corresponding pursuits in cultural and civil domains have been fueled by citizen’s desire to differentiate postcolonial selfhood from two top-down ideologies: neoliberalism – inherited by the regional government and deepened after the Asian financial crisis – that supports a real-estate hegemony at the cost of the well-being of a growing civil society^[5] and, meanwhile, nationalism that impels the city’s cultural and territorial integration with Mainland China.^[6] The implementation of the two ideologies, through grand spatial planning projects including infrastructure and architecture building, recommodification of property and land through destructive reclamation, and gentrification by heritage preservation renders spatial politics one arena of the conflicting governmental and civil postcolonial transitions. Focusing on the latter process, I consider what cultural critic Chan Koon-Chung frames as the “theoretical language of self-articulation”^[7] – rather than essentialist cultural claims – as the core practices and values of Hong Kong’s post-coloniality. Based on the above analytical framing, this essay examines how spatially concerned SEA broadens the theoretical and social scope of Hong Kong’s postcolonial knowledge-making through three case studies.

Democratizing aesthetics

The history of urban spatial contestations in post-Handover Hong Kong is often deemed to have started with the campaigns against the demolition of former Lee Tung Street (2003-2008) in Wan Chai and the Star Ferry Pier as well as the Queen’s Pier in Central (2006-2007). This period was captured by local documentary collective v-artivist (since 2007). Using the camera as a tool for documenting, participating, and empowering grassroots social movements and embedded everyday resistances, the guerrilla SEA co-operative has since followed local people’s spatial struggle in multiple old urban districts and rural areas from the two piers and Wan Chai to Sham Shui Po, Cheung Sha Wan, To Kwa Wan, and the New Territories. Its work spanning over fifteen years have yielded a list of documentaries^[8] that constitute a panorama of Hong Kong’s post-Handover transition, several video series that experiment with creative storytelling and visual-spatial critiques,^[9] and a network of mutual support among those who are affected by and concerned with top-down urban planning. Here I explore, through the lens of postcolonial knowledge-making, how these practices and outcomes may offer methods and channels, critical analytical frameworks, and societal foundation for the subaltern producers of urban space.

Adopting a participatory approach of filmmaking, v-artivist encourages their collaborators to articulate their thoughts and feelings as interviewees, film their surroundings, and engage in the post-filming production. The group’s documentary projects accordingly accumulated a large sum of footage over the years, which were assembled in the essay film The Streets ·The Way, A Love Letter for Us (2013). Following what was learned from the collaborating citizens since the early 2000s, Lee Wai Yi, a member of v-artivist and local writer, formulated the film around six narratives. Together, they reveal what is held most dear to the residents about the old districts: the playfulness and vitality of street life, a wholesome livelihood provided by small economies, the beauty of street-front shops, collectively held and sustained principles of utilizing public spaces, and communal life bounded by the ethics of care. ^[10] By a dialogical process, these personal accounts gradually shaped into the discourses of the essential values of existing urban spaces, constructed, perceived, and envisioned by the grassroots. I argue that in these discourses a radical post-coloniality, not necessarily expressed with clear consciousness or intentionality, can be found. 

On the basic level, they challenge the top-down planning logic by which the replacement of the “old” by the “new” is justified for building a better Hong Kong. For decision-makers like the Development Bureau and the Planning Department, old urban districts can only be described as deteriorative and threatening to the city’s habitability. The “decanting” of old buildings is thus reasonable and favourable as it also necessitates the expansion of new satellite towns or, even, artificial islands, where the evicted residents should be relocated to make room for redeveloping urban centres.^[11] It is doubtful that any attentive mind would be unaware that the discourse is tailored for sustaining a real-estate hegemony through perpetuating gentrification. However, what runs deeper is a critique elicited by the citizen’s voice. In particular, the spatial experience and knowledge of grassroots, articulated and mediated through v-artivist’s projects, shows that the citizens’ memory of their urban spatial practices has greatly shaped their sense of belonging to the city. This human-space affinity lies at the centre of urban residents’ cultural self-identification, which has never been contained by imperial and continuous colonial spatial governance. Such spatial identification is precisely what contemporary urban renewal threatens to uproot. This suggests that the pro-development governmental propaganda is also replacing real negotiation with the material and institutional legacies of colonial urban policies – essential for Hong Kong’s postcolonial transition – with an overly easy effacement of yesterday by tomorrow. In turn, the citizen’s desire to hold fast to their identification with the urban space can be seen as an expression of postcolonial subjectivity that refuses to be quenched by a fast-forward-ness to the future.

To further consider the role of v-artivist’s approach in fermenting this postcolonial subjectivity of the grassroots, it is crucial to understand its mission of “democratizing art among the commons”^[12] and the central place it gives to aesthetics in their visual-spatial critique. Aesthetics, when broadly defined as the “distribution of the sensible that determines a mode of articulation between forms of action, production, perception, and thought,”^[13] is a domain in which our senses and sensibility are engineered from the top down. For instance, planners and developers often market new residential zones by portraying the old districts as decaying and unhygienic. By forwarding counterimages of the old district space as intriguing, poetic, and life-nurturing, v-artivist foregrounds the redistribution of the sensible that has always been undergirding the bottom-up production of urban space. 

Meanwhile, this process of democratizing art also gives credibility to the grassroots as the producer of situated spatial knowledge and space itself while bringing together more citizens through filmmaking and community screenings. In working also with underprivileged Mainland China immigrants and ethnic minorities, v-artivist’ practice has established the alliance among communities across multiple social and cultural borders. Since the pre-Hanover years, studies of Hong Kong’s cultural and identity politics have been predominantly concerned with the filmic and literary expressions, law and constitution, visual culture, and civil movements from the elites’ perspective. ^[14]In contrast, v-artist’s emphasis on grassroots, quotidian aesthetics posts a challenge to this hierarchy intrinsic to the discourse of postcolonial cultural politics. As pointed out by Lee Wai Yi, the old community space, unlike symbolic historical heritages or idyllic rural villages, are often left out by those who appeal for the preservation of so-called collective memories of Hong Kong people.^[15] This unbalanced emphasis given to different urban spaces is structured by discrimination against the aesthetics of the commoners. In turn, v-artivist’s retraining of our perceptive sensitivity towards the urban space, either through everyday life or image production, can be a useful tool of decolonizing both our senses and existent structures of postcolonial knowledge-making and circulation. 

Ecologizing cultural identity 

My second case focuses on SEA that takes form in art festivals held onsite in rural spaces of Hong Kong. It is exemplified by “Woodstock in Spring: An Arts Festival Among the Ruins,” a two-day event initiated by local activists, cultural workers, and residents of the old Choi Yuen Village at the imminent demolition of the place in 2011. The village was brought into the public view in 2008 by a governmental plan to remove it for constructing “an emergency rescue station and stabling sidings”^[16] of the Guangzhou–Shenzhen–Hong Kong Express Rail Link (hereafter XRL). The announcement aroused a series of protestations and media campaigns known as the Anti-XRL movement, along the course of which the villagers were forced to change their demand from preserving the village and land to a reasonable procedure of relocation.^[17] When the festival took place near the end of the movement, the village – then half in ruins – was destined to be taken down. This timing is crucial for understanding the rationale and long-term implications of the event. As reflected by local cultural worker Tse Ngosheung, differing from political actions and art activism, the festival aimed not at changing the political status quo or even governmental decision but a “cultural regeneration.”^[18]

Tse’s phrasing expressed an eagerness to identify with this “culture in regeneration” and embrace it as part of Hong Kong’s collective identity. Yet, whose culture, from where it was originated, and why it needed regeneration? The old Choi Yuen Village was built by Mainland China immigrants who settled in the New Territories (hereafter N.T.) in the 1950s. In the following decades, they stabilized an agriculture and husbandry economy sufficient to support a village community that the senior villagers expected to pass down to the younger generations.^[19] Although the agrarian sector has been completely missing from colonial and post-Handover governmental urban planning since the 1980s,^[20]  the village continued to cultivate their culture and everyday practices. 

Values and ethics harboured by this social space – economic and material self-sufficiency, familial love bounded to the land, sense of belonging to the environment, responsibility and revere for soil and its outputs, and attentiveness to surrounding species – have long been eclipsed by the triumphing neoliberalist economy and urbanization since the late colonial days.^[21]  Not only has this rural-urban division continued after the Handover, new governmental agenda to integrate the city into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is now accelerating the reclamation of farmland and village communities in the Northeast N.T. for building transportation networks and residencies.^[22]  Reversely, to bring the ecoculture of the Choi Yuen Village and the broader N.T. into the public discourse of Hong Kong culture and identity politics, as Tse envisioned, is thus a forceful counterproposal to both prolonged colonialism and totalitarian nationalism.

As resistance against land reclamation spreads in the N.T., more SEA projects like the Woodstock festival have transformed villages under spatial contestation into sites of ecocultural resuscitation. The “Wang Chau Jackfruit Festival” was held annually from 2017 to 2020 in three villages of Wang Chau, now evicted for building public housing; two editions of “EmptySCape Art Festival” were organized in 2013 and 2015 in natural and discarded public spaces Ping Che by art collective EmptySCape and Ta Ku Ling/Ping Che Alliance, a civil organization dedicated to the preservation of Northeast N.T.; “The Third Space I: Sai Wan Winter Camp,” organized in 2015 by Asian Art Archive, responded to private developers’ attempted reclamation of an ancient village in Sai Wan. These representative cases demonstrate the irreplaceability of participatory art, as compared to direct political actions, when it comes to long-term social implications. By fermenting happiness and affection through festivals, they not only helped to temporally sustain the liveliness of the N.T. but also encouraged Hong Kong urbanites to adopt rural culture as part of their cultural selfhood. This is saliently seen in the formation of new farming groups such as the Mapopo Community Farm and Sangwoodgoon (both since 2010) by young people from various professions and urban districts. In turn, this rural-spatial turn is seeding an ecological consciousness into art and cultural production in the local scene.

Looking back, the branding of mountains, seascapes, and rich biodiversity as part of metropolitan Hong Kong has always prevailed in popular and literary media. However, the human-land relationship – especially in rural settings – had long been excluded from discourses of local identity formation until the recent five years or less.^[23]  According, I argue that the rediscovery and articulation of an ecocultural identity through SEA is a critical expression of postcolonial identity politics. Foremost, it acknowledges rural citizens as contributors to a cultural Hong Kong, which expands the scope of the city’s cultural and identity politics. Equally important is that the ecological turn of self-identification is shaping N.T. into a crucial space on the past and future cultural landscape of Hong Kong, which defies the official representation of the city as solely a world financial centre equipped with tourist resources of mountains and seas. Lastly, this ecocultural identification further lends the preservation of rural Hong Kong a more far-reaching ground based on, rather than certain political stances, the consideration of environmental ethics and ecological sustainability. 

Reappropriating space, revitalizing communities

The last model of SEA, community-based art space, is exemplified by Woofter Ten (2009-2015), a non-profit organization based in a storefront space at Shanghai Street no.404 in Yau Ma Tei old district. In the 1880s, the district developed into a heavily populated residential area with a vigorous economy consisting of boat manufacturing, commerce, merchandise, craftsmanship, and service businesses.^[24]  Many of these clustered on Shanghai Street, where the residents lived upper floor while stores were run downstairs. Businesses on the street have seen a gradual downturn since the 1980s. In particular, rent increase and dispossession led by the government have forced many to close down while chain stores owned by developers came in replacement. When Woofer Ten was granted the managerial right of no. 404 by the Art Development Council, the unit had turned from a privately owned Chinese medicine shop to governmental property.^[25]  Concerned with the degradation of the district, the organization ventured beyond the white box model by using the space as a platform for community nexus and an incubator of curatorial, residency, and SEA projects.

Compared to v-artivist and the Woodstock art festival, Woofter Ten was not founded on resistance movements but an increased attentiveness to spatial justice among the citizens and a long-term social turn of Hong Kong art. Its Chinese title “活化廳,” meaning “hall of revitalization,” identifies its mission to invigorate local communities through spatial practice. This is firstly observed in enthusiasm for sustaining the small businesses and craftmanship on Shanghai Street through its debut event “Few Few Prize, Many Many Praise,”^[26]  after which the neighbourhood culture had been incorporated in no. 404’s spatial display. Meanwhile, various recurring and one-time events such as art residencies, street theatres, and community workshops were held to break the boundary between the art space and the street. Echoing with v-artivist’s critique that heritage preservation, Woofer Ten’s revitalization approach also defied the top-down revitalization through gentrification. Instead, it proposed to reactivate community life through cancelling spatial demarcation and practising embedded resistance against large incorporations and developers in the everyday maintenance of the old district. In recent years, a similar approach is observed in several other local groups dedicated to preserving old districts. These include ToHome (since 2013) in To Kwa Wan, where urban renewal has been the most intense these years, Hong Kong House of Stories (since 2010) in Wan Chai, Tak Cheong Lane (since 2011) in Mong Kok, and Pitt Street 18 in Yau Ma Tei (2016-2018).

As a well-networked group, Woofer Ten has been included in several major surveys conducted at the intersection of SEA and spatial theories.^[27]  Together, these surveys unfold a topology of community-based art spaces in East and Southeast Asia. While overlapping partially with the recent art-historical discussion of the emergence of alternative art spaces, they have focused on the broader subject of urban spatial production in Asian cities rather than the ecology of contemporary art production per se. Their shared geographical framing within Asia indicates that Woofer Ten and other similar spaces are Hong Kong not isolated, regional phenomena. To understand how these SEA projects are related to a spatial concern, historically and political shared by this region, a further analysis beyond Hong Kong is thus required. In response to these projects, I here consider postcolonial spatiality as a shared condition among certain Asia-Pacific cities.

When it comes to postcolonial studies, Anglophone analytical frameworks lose their pertinent in East Asia, where postcolonial conditions are differentiated from city to city, state to state by the situated entanglement of imperial and internal colonization along various lines of power division in each location. However, a similar historical process, namely the industrial modernization achieved through “a fundamental rearrangement of urban and national space that had begun in the colonial period”^[28]  has characterized these regions. Accordingly, the “material configuration and corresponding aesthetic form”^[29]  this process has engendered has also become, for many contemporary Asia cities, a shared problem. This is symptomatized by, materially, crumped metropolises built on historically imaged lands of tabula rasa and, infrastructurally, hyper-platforms for neoliberalist economic production. It is therefore hardly a coincidence that the ongoing anti-colonial and decolonial struggles in East Asia regions are so intensively manifested in urban-spatial politics. And for these struggles, the production of alternative economic and political spaces for the local community as well as the intervention into existing politics of aesthetics have are necessarily indispensable.

Based on this historical framing, spatial analyses of Woofer Ten may offer a reference to the study of similar community-based art spaces in Asia. On one hand, these groups and collectives are diverse in their concerning social issues, artistic approaches, and communal foundation. Some undertake specific functions, run as a restaurant, a library, or a radio station; some are devoted to the promotion of specific art practices, such as print-making and sewing as activist media.^[30]  On the other hand, against a common backdrop of postcolonial spatiality, consideration of the spatial politics involved in each case can potentially illuminate the situated conditions of subaltern spatial production in each place. Meanwhile, this cross-regional association also indicates the possibility to frame Hong Kong’s postcolonial spatial politics with the broader time-space of postcolonial Asia.

Conclusion

As aforementioned, the contestation over spatial production in post-Hanover Hong indicates that the city’s postcolonial transition is also a two-way course conflicted between top-down and bottom-up envisioning of the future. Yet even the participants assembling in the latter process cannot be represented by an undifferentiated category of citizenhood. This is because, as the case studies illustrate, postcolonial actions are grounded in multiple positions occupied by social groups differentiate by location, socio-economic class, education, ethnicity, among other parameters. Therefore, when talking about the postcolonial subjectivity of Hong Kong, we need to first reflect on whose subjectivity is being referred to, which communities are concerned in specific scaling of postcolonial knowledge-making, and which ones are excluded? Practising such intersectional analysis^[31]  is called for to decolonize our ways of knowledge making.

Correspondingly, it is observed that Hong Kong SEA, with its participatory nature and an intention to generate social changes, has broadened the societal and theoretical ground of postcolonial knowledge production. Its foregrounding of grassroots and rural residents as historical and contemporary actants of decolonial and postcolonial processes is a major contribution to the cultural and identity politics of post-Handover Hong Kong. Meanwhile, through art’s engagement in spatial practice, local artists and cultural workers have also become identified with certain ways of belonging to the city, often through learning from their collaborators. In this sense, SEA can be seen as an infrastructure for postcolonial cultural production. Lastly, my preliminary observation of the convergence of SEA and spatial production as a common phenomenon in postcolonial East Asia cities suggests a crossing of art history and postcolonial studies on the topic, the implication of which should be explored through further research.