Culture Club | In a Tsim Sha Tsui mall, art tells the tale of a city or two ahead of Hong Kong Gallery Week

There was a time where art and commerce were mortal enemies. Art was the saint, whereas commerce was deemed evil. And if there was ever any crossover between the two, the resulting works were degraded as commercial, with low artistic value created solely to keep cash registers ringing.

But in a healthy cultural ecology, support from commerce is indispensable. Cash is a necessary component of setting up exhibitions and producing shows, from venue bookings to administrative expenses. Artists need to be paid too – they have to eat and they have bills to pay. And when bureaucracy gets in the way of application for government funding and causes a major headache for many artists and arts groups, sponsorship from the private sector is not necessarily evil.

Hong Kong’s new media art group Videotage seems to have found a middle path.

Just over the weekend, I managed to catch the exhibition Both Sides Now II – It Was the Best of Times, it Was the Worst of Times? before it closed. Jointly presented by Videotage and Britain’s videoclub, this exhibition of moving images was staged at K11 art space – a gallery located at K11 shopping centre, the show’s co-presenter – in Tsim Sha Tsui, right inside an MTR station tunnel that would see hundreds of thousands of city dwellers pass by.

The show is the second part of the Both Sides Now series that has travelled to UK cities Brighton, Hastings, Leicester, London, Manchester, Portsmouth, and Shanghai and Wuhan in China. Hong Kong is the final stop.

Viewers get to see a wide range of moving image works by artists from Hong Kong juxtaposing those by British artists. Recent works are shown side by side with those dating back to as early as 1990 – and some are very critical and provocative, politically, socially and aesthetically.