Day 4

M+ Museum Hong Kong
It had become late the previous night, tasting a range of famous Hong Kong desserts in a traditionally looking alley, (cockroaches) someplace in quickly gentrifying West Kowloon District. I am happy to solitary breakfast at 8 o’clock while watching commuting Hong Kong workers pouring into the city. They bring a special kind of rather relaxed energy in the streets. Its Hong Kong, it’s about 10.000 km from Maastricht, and I feel at home.

We meet around 10 am with curator Tobias Berger (Germany) and two freshly appointed colleague curators in a posh real-estate-developers-office building with at spectacular view on the harbour and on the premises designated for the yet-to-be-built M+ museum. Planned opening: 2017. A perfectly realistic ambition in this part of the world.

Tobias starts with apologising for the general character of the power point. It’s developed to convince politicians. A species of mankind he doesn’t seem to particularly like. He states that Hong Kong, despite two state run museums, is in real need of a Museum for Visual Culture. A museum that reflects the special character of Hong Kong, a place where Falung Gong coexist with other groups; where all groups protesting regularly in the streets are also all marching peacefully together. Hong Kong, says Berger, needs a museum that functions as a neutral platform, and as a place for dialogue. A museum also with no huge walls between the different fields of design, architecture, visual art and public culture. However, quite recently something spectacular happened, which probably shaked a bit their initials plans. Swiss art collector Ulli Sigg donated and partly sold his renowned Chinese contemporary art collection to M+ Museum. From one week to another, Director Lars Nittve and his M+ team became guardians of a huge collection. So obviously, next to being a platform of discussion and all kinds of adventurous multidisciplinary projects, Tobias now also stresses the fact that M+ museum feels an urgency to create excellent storage facilities and to engage in in Hong Kong hard-to-find qualified back office staff such as registrars etc.  ‘Why change (‘rethink’ is the catch phrase) the classical model of a museum when it has been OK for more than 200 years’ he says. (the powerpoint sheet actually shows: rethink the museum model ) ‘You just adapt it to your needs’.

Energetic mr. Tobias Berger, who had not even one full stop in his speech.
The starting point for M+ is in any case Hong Kong. The collection and programming strategy should create opportunities for Hong Kong artists to get outside of Asia and for international contemporary art to get into Hong Kong. M+ is going to focus on well-curated shows and on finding international collaborations with institutions (like the Tate), to help develop the professional standard of the museum. Tobias emphasizes again and over the importance of having Hong Kong as a focal point regarding collection building and programming.

This is what I see from my hotel window in Hong Kong
I was a bit wondering how much rhetoric was in his statements, as Tobias also showed a keen preference for A-class international art, which is only natural for a German-born internationally working curator.

The red spot is the future M+ museum. Yellow are other cultural institutions yet to be built before 2017. In the meantime someone still has to design the museum building  ‘from the inside out’, as Tobias nicely states. That means: not a spectacle outside and unworkable situation inside. An open call and with an expert international jury (‘important to get details right in the competition’, ‘no politicians!) led to six world famous architectural buro’s to be shortlisted. Well-formulated commission creates good competition, says Tobias. Oh I forgot: we talk about a museum the size of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a hundreds of millions US Dollar acquisition budget. The museum has to provide for big spaces because among others contemporary Chinese productions are mostly huge.  To get the finances right the museum has to invest in retail, dining and entertaining. The aim is a museum free of charge.

A view from the entrance of the ferry boat

Tobias hopes that the museum will help building Hong Kong’s identity structure. Getting into identity-discussions is rather problematic and immediately sparkled a lot of questions and wide-ranging discussion among our group during and after the meeting. M+ Museum starts from scratch; it started with ‘two guys in a room’,  according to Tobias. That’s a fascinating thought, the possibility to  ‘do things better’ (courtesy Philips).  The discussions centred around complex issues such as the contemporary museum as a western concept imported to China and  the persons in charge being Europeans.  I guess behind all our questions and remarks sits a lot of uneasiness about the role and position of art and the art framework in a quickly changing global world. The discussions nicely ramificated on for hours and only silenced after we all closed the hotel door behind our back well after midnight.  Sometimes I am a bit wary to enter into discussions because you know you have to invest both time and energy in trying to understand each other. Especially the art world created a certain global language which has become hardly bearable. But today proved very rewarding. Which reminds me of something Ben Knapen was saying to us in his briefing at Schiphol airport. If you want to collaborate with Chinese and Indonesian partners you have to invest first, literally buying time to have the opportunity to get to know each other. Later when there truly mutual trust, you will be rewarded doubly.

Motto from hotel stationary in Shenzhen:
To love and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence
Paula van den Bosch

Para/Site in Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s skyline is impressive. If the cities were in competition, in my view, it would easily win from, say, New York. When at the end of today we left Hong Kong by bus in the direction of Shenzen, the high-rises standing site by site along the coastline (which, by the way, is embellished with many spectactularly lighted and bridges) did not finish for what seemed a very long hour. Before we left, we met Cosmin Costinas, the former curator of BAK (Basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht), who in 2011 moved away from the Netherlands because of his new job as director of Para/Site, a non-commercial gallery devoted to the presentation of contemporary art.

Para/Site is one of a few smaller art galleries located at street level in central Hong Kong, in an area where ground floor space is extremely expensive. (Think of €6000 a month for an old shop space of around 150 square meters!) Although the high price is a pain even for the largely sponsored and relatively well-off Para/Site, after the last annual increase in rent the institution’s management decided to stay at this location. According to Cosmin, the reason for this is that Para/Site needs to nourish its relationship with the neighbourhood. After all, the ground floor location enables people to drop in to the gallery spontaneously. Taking the lift up to the, say, 25^th floor of a high-rise, on the other hand, is indeed an obstacle for less motivated or time-pressed gallery visitors. And believe me or not, after seeing the umpteenth panorama, the views quickly lose their thrill, even for those just passing through Hong Kong. The high-rises are places where people work, sleep or withdraw, while real life takes place in the streets.
To Hong Kong’s bustling streets, Para/Site adds artists’ narratives free of charge for the visitors. However, the works on display do demand that visitors pay attention to historical, aesthetic, cultural and/or political issues, which are not always easily accessible. That’s why Para/Site offers points of entry in the form of wall texts, publications, reading groups, seminars and the like. Furthermore, the institution supports the production and presentation of work that does not usually find a way into commercial galleries for contemporary art. These works are often intellectually challenging; they provoke different readings, so that it’s not easy for the visitor to immediately make sense of them. At best, the works give you something to take home and think about. They would make you think about certain issues that are relevant to the exhibiting artists. The curatorial materials on offer do point in certain directions, but they do not explain the works on display. Under Cosmin’s directorship, Para/Site will continue its initial function as a space for artists. The institution’s curatorial team maintains relations with the Hong Kong Art School.
There are certainly more points on which Tobias Berger (who, by the way, is a former director of Para/Site) and Cosmin Costinas agree, but one became very clear today: they both think of Hong Kong as a flourishing city which should accentuate and compliment its position of power through art and culture. Hong Kong is, in Cosmin’s terms, just not a “postcolonial backwater”. As others have noted, at present the city is witnessing a golden age.
Recently Para/Site’s team was reinforced by Qinyi Lim, who I first met in Amsterdam where she was taking the curatorial programme at de Appel in 2011/2012. Qinyi told me that she is currently preparing an exhibition around the theme of anxiety, which will be shown in Para/Site next year, and which will certainly be thrilling.
Last but not least, Qinyi and Cosmin pointed to some other interesting institutions for contemporary art in Hong Kong:
Experimenta
Oneaspace

Day 3

Hong Kong
Good morning Hong-Kong! We started our jam-packed day with a much-needed caffeine injection in a little coffee bar next door to the hotel, and then headed straight to the Asia Art Archive [http://www.aaa.org.hk]. Located in a non-descript building this initiative was founded in 2000 with the urgent mission to collect – and make accessible – information and material on the recent history of contemporary art in Asia. AAA had a rather flexible working definition of what is understood under “Asia”, but newly appointed Head of Research and

Programmes Hammad Nasar describes it as “the geography from the Bosphorus to the Pacific.” Now that’s a very big and diverse region, however they’ve got expert and excellent help from a.o. researchers posted in China, Hong Kong/PRD, India, the Philippines, Seoul, Taiwan, Thailand, and Tokyo. AAA can best be described as a “living archive” that actively addresses the lack in Asia of physical infrastructure (i.e. public institutions, archives, etc) and knowledge infrastructure (i.e. critical discourse, scholarship, documentation, writing, art history, etc). Not only does it try to fill in the gaps of how in the region the history of modernity and of the contemporary has been told, it also tries to complicate these very narratives.

Before we sat down for a chat with co-founder and executive director Claire Hsu, Head of Research and Programmes Hammad Nasar, and Assistant Head of Research Janet Chan, we were warmly welcomed by the Head Librarian, the spirited Lydia Ngai, who showed us their impressive collection of catalogues, journals and periodicals. We were even granted a few minutes in the tiny climate-controlled (= freezing) archive room, where they keep artist files and other original material, from sketches, portfolios, to artist’s personal correspondence, and event documentation. At this moment AAA is working hard to digitize its material. Much is already available online, and the catalogue is fully searchable online. In addition they run a residency program where artists can work in – and with – the archive, and reconceptualise and rethink it as an active place of production, rather than only a place for collection. The most recent residents were MAP Office [www.map-office.com] a French artist/architect duo based in Hong Kong since 1996. We would meet them later on in the evening. They constructed a physical atlas of artists found in the archive, based on a cataloguing system that maps the mental and physical contours of the field AAA operates in.

Claire, Hammad and Janet then filled us in on the details of operation, and were very gracious with their time answering our many questions. AAA is a unique and enthusing enterprise in a region where there is a great lack of independent archives. What is striking is the team’s insistence on being an open, process-oriented, accessible and welcoming public platform. Definitely far removed form the stuffy and hermetic connotations libraries or archives might conjure up. Hammad summed it up nicely when he said that at AAA they “think in public”. Nat Muller, 6^th November 2012.

Our second visit today (Tuesday the 6th) was Osage at Union Hing Yip Factory Building, which is both a foundation and a gallery/ exhibition space. Osage existed since 2004 and has since then developed from a foundation into facilitating a lot of other functions. Today they also run an artist-in-residence program and engage in experimental art projects as well as collaboratory projects with other institutions. According to the director, Agnes Lin, Osage strives to take part in the development of the Hong Kong Art scene, which she sees as a very important task.
We visited two different locations. The first space displayed works by three young artists. One of them, Au Hoi Lam, was a student of Lui Chung Kwong, who worked in the residence space next door and is soon to have an exhibition there. Au Hoi Lam’s project took its point of departure in one Lui Chung Kwong older paintings, which she had deconstructed and made into a completely new work:

If only there were no lies 11.11.2011 (image)

The other Osage-space contained several exhibitions the biggest being a group show of young Thai artists entitled Nuova Arte Povera and dealing with new aspects of poverty. Several interesting works featured in the exhibition, not least the photos series by Lek Kiatsirikajorn, Lost in Paradice. The rest of the large exhibition space hosted a series of individual presentations. I found Kingsley Ng’s sound/video installation Record: Light from +22 16′ 14″ + 114 08′ 48″ from 2008 – which it about ways of viewing and seeing and the “translation” of perceptions – especially interesting.

Osage them treated our whole group with a delicious lunch – thanks for our hospitality! See more at osagegallery.com
Kristine Kern 

Saamlung
After visiting the development area of Western Kowloon, we went back in the minibus and drove to the Central area of Hong Kong to visit Saamlung, a small gallery space on the 26^th floor of an office building (apparently not far from Gagosian, White Cube, Simon Lee and other galleries). We got an introduction by the founder/owner Robin Peckham who set up the gallery only about a year ago after having worked for several years in Beijing.

The artists presented in the gallery are roughly 1/3 Hong King based, 1/3 from the Chinese mainland and 1/3 American. When asked about the main difference between working with American and Chinese colleagues, Robin answered that most American galleries are eager to present (and get work sold by) their artists in Asia while the Chinese are more reluctant and don’t really see the importance of presenting their artists in Hong Kong where the audience and collectors are more internationally oriented than in the mainland. Saamlung is positioned right in between and Robin Peckham works to help artists cross these boundaries. Apart from the gallery activities (in the gallery, art fairs, etc) Saamling also does some art consultancy on the side, assisting institutions and others with knowledge of the local art scene (example: upcoming exhibition of Hong Kong based artists at the Saatchi Gallery in London). More info: www.saamlung.com.

Spring Workshop
After a brief break at the hotel, we went to the Spring Workshop in the industrial neighbourhood of Wong Chuk Hang. Mimi Brown, founder and director, received us on the roof terrace on the 3^rd floor and introduced us to the visions for Spring: to host an international programme of residencies, exhibitions, music, film and talks.

She described Spring as an institution that for instance might step in and assist the existing institutions, for example they will help present a project by Song Dong in January which was initiated by AAA (Asia Art Archive) and a collaboration with the M+ museum. The Spring space is newly designed and has fancy studio/living spaces for the residents (a round bed?!) as well as kitchens, lounges, and incredible toilets!

Henriette Bretton-Meyer

William Lim Private Collection
Spring was more or less the end of our busy day, but why not mix business and pleasure? Our last stop today was the architect William Lim’s private collection, which primarily contains local art from Hong Kong – 39 works of art were on display in his fantastic office/meeting room designed by CL3 ARCHITECTS LTD. Lim takes a special interest in artistic projects with an architectural twist.

Kacey Wong is among the artists in the collection and was also present for this evening event. He gave us an introduction to his work as well as several of the other artists. Besides from seeing the Lim-collection our reason for going was also to meet with the local art scene. Here Cosmin Costinas form Para/Site Art Space and Kevin Lim moderated an interesting (standing dinner-) discussion on Hong Kong art and the challenges and forces of the scene. Kristine Kern

We also got desserts
Cosmin suggested to go for desserts so we jumped in a number of cabs and went to a tiny dessert place with small tables and stools in the street. Lovely to finish the day with something sweet – we ordered lots and among the creations were Coconut Herbal Jelly, Sesame Soup with Lotus Seeds, Cold Sago Soup with Mango and Pomelo, Steaming Ginger Tea with Sesame Paste Rice Balls, Imperial Chine Gelatin made with Sweet Gui Hua Flowers, Litchi Panna Cotta (a favourite) and Stewed Snow Fungus & Papaya in Rock Sugar Soup – ah!

Henriette Bretton-Meyer

Day 1 & 2

Day 1
Sunday afternoon.
The group meets in Schipol few hours before departure.
In the fully operating “Exchange Avenue” room (highly recommended for a very functional, HUO type of meeting) each participant addresses the group: different backgrounds, manyfold objectives, various interests. The heterogeneity of the memebers suggests that the inspirations of this research trip will come from the outside as much as form the inside.

The program is planned in order to fade away from western culture gradually, at least in art terms: first Hong Kong, followed by inland China, then Indonesia. The flight is not long (9 hours to reach the other side of the planet is pretty good), but long enough to have some insights from passengers going back to China. I am lucky and find myself sitting next to a young man charming enough to share his visions on the country. How does it feel, for the younger generations to live in a country experiencing each year a 10% of economical growth? Their expectations, or perception of the future is radically different from a european perspective. Europeans tend to be more skeptical and the idea that future generations will live a better life is more of a hope than a belief. In China is manly a certitude, which radically changes the vision of their attitude to the present.

In chinese schools, children are (still) taught how the Western humiliated them, which partly structures the “Pride of the Nation”. You can talk to very different people, with disparate social backgrounds, moreover the medium class is growing rapidly which opens up the spectrum of personal tastes, but if you question on matters of the Nation, such as Taiwan, Tibet, etc. you will get always the same answer (guess which one). All differences are flattened out when it is about national pride. It is then not unlikely to find a mixture of sophistication and nationalism, which is a distinctive character of China. The following, obvious question, from a western perspective would be, how to cope this attitude with democracy? Is it a value, a dream or not even an issue? In a seemly semi-authoritative consumer state, it is more about fear than convictions. There seem to be fear towards the specter of anarchy. Chinese people openly don’t embrace an authoritative state but they would feel even more uncomfortable with the opposite. What wins, so far is pragmatism and the unique party is aware of it.

We land and my first impression is a mixture between downtown New York and Naples. First stop will be a hair saloon temporarily turned into a project space. Sounds promising.

Day 2
Today, November 5, 2012 we arrived in Hong Kong at 16:40 (expected arrival time). We were picked up by a small van and taken to the hotel. Then we had about an hour to take a shower and for me to get my phone working and the wifi installed. With freshly washed hair I got down and we walked to MIACA (Moving Image Archive of Contemporary Art) with a small detour. MIACA moved here from Japan because of the earthquake and other reasons. It was founded in Japan in 2006 and preserves and distributes moving image works and is one of the earliest institutions specialized in the region’s moving image art as they say themselves.

No large presentation space for the event that we were coming for tonight, no it was hosted in a hairdresser shop and we were seated on tiny Japanese (which looked like children’s) stools; brightly coloured. There were some Japanese crackers, ships, grapes and beverages and you were politely asked to give a small contribution for that (but we all had only our large bills from the ATM around the corner of the hotel).

Constant Dullaart (1979) the Dutch artist whom was giving a presentation about his work was briefly introduced. He is in Hong Kong because of his Mondriaan Fund residency in OCAT Shenzhen, but more about that when we get there in a couple of days.

Dullaart gave a overview about his work. He started by showing a video compiled of functional video’s that people made because they wanted to sell a piece of furniture, goats, a car, or anything else on the internet through a Dutch website called speurders.nl. The anthropological interest of Dullaart becomes clear here and the video shows the functional reason for the aesthetics of a certain video, why documenting it in this particular way? Now we are very used to amateur video’s and the vernacular aesthetics being part of that, but before YouTube this wasn’t the case. Dullaart’s work is very much about these tools and programs that are coming into being at a certain point and that influence our vision or idea of the representation of reality at that point. There is a discrepancy between software tools and the documentation of reality like Dullaart says.

He showed the url’s chess.org and urinal.org that he claimed and purchased and that refer to the readymades by Duchamp. These domain names are functioning in the same way. Like a bridge, but without a road, as Dullaart explained. He likes to play with our consuming behavior of a generic internet language as he calls it.

Then he continues with explaining his websites as performatives acts with live content, instead of a recorded video. This ‘disease’ piece displays different google image searches for a subject like disease in the different colours blue, red, yellow wherein content and color not relate to each other anymore in the google search machines. He also made ‘the revolving internet’ that makes the google browser turn everything upside down and move along. This website got almost immediately 40.000 visitors and then afterwards even millions.

Now in the residency he is working with the Chinese #1 fast growing Chinese websites called youku, a sort of YouTube, because YouTube is banned. And is making these ‘bricolage gestures’ as he likes to name them. And he is doing a ‘revolving internet’ turn around thing of the Chinese search engine and asked people for a Chinese song that is about changing seasons and turnarounds that he put under the piece as tune. This beautiful song makes the Chinese laugh and they don’t want to tell Constant the reason for the laughter. I guess we never will find out either.

We cannot stay for the last 5 minutes of explaining his latest piece, because of a dinner appointment across the street, but Dullaart (which is his real name) will send it to us through e-mail or show it at OCAT.

We have dinner at Yung Kee Restaurant where we are joined by the others from the group who just got in Hong Kong: Lissa Kinnaer, Mai Abu ElDahab, Annette Schönholzer and Caroline Nicod. Also joining us for dinner are these people living in Hong Kong: Qinyi Lim, from Para Site, Claudia Albertini, Director Platform China, Tobias Berger, curator M+ Museum, Kevin Chin-Kwok Lim, Managing Director openUU ltd.

I am not closely sitting to any of the guests from Hong Kong but spoke briefly to Claudia who explains about Platform China that it recently opened up a branch in Hong Hong and that they show emerging artists. And Tobias Berger tells about Hong Kong being limbo land, not being one or the other, but always a bit of both. Though he finds it hard to understand, he sort of gets Hong Kong and says that China starts to resemble more and more Hong Kong instead of the other way around.

The restaurant contains only round tables and after reading the conversation between Chen Zhen and Zhu Xian – that was given to us by Defne Ayas, the director of Witte de With because she could not make it yesterday for an introduction by her on the Chinese (art) world – immediately strikes me. In the conversation it became clear that the round table comes from the Chinese festive meal, which implies unity, harmony and dialogue. Something that is very much at stake in Chinese culture as we may believe so. But Chen Shen made a piece based on a round table at the United Nations because the round table also originates from international round table conferences which implies discussion, negotiation, political dealing and power constraints, something that is not at ease with Chinese people.

But more references to the conversation will come in other blogs (of mine), cause it is a rich source on chinese (artistic) culture. I will just end this blog by two famous chinese sayings that are in the text as well: ‘Ten thousand changes will not alter the essence of things’, and ‘Stay unchanged to face off the ten thousand changes.’

Curious to tomorrow! Petra Heck, Nov. 5, 2012

Orientation Trip 2012

The 2012 trip is organised by the Mondriaan Fund. Participating institutes are BAM – the Flemish institute for visual, audiovisual and media art (since 2007),  the Danish Agency for Culture and Pro Helvetia (since 2011).

From 4 to 16 November this year´s orientation trip will bring a group of curators to China and Indonesia. The group will visit museums, galleries and meet people active in the field of contemporary art in Hong Kong, China (Shenzhen and Guangzhou) and Indonesia (Jakarta and Yogyakarta).