'Déjà Disparu' exhibition is more than a blast from the past

Pearl Lam Galleries features a selection of older works by four Hong Kong artists who have been active for more than two decades.

And it feels like an anomaly: while the artworks on show are of unquestionable cultural significance, it makes for an interesting debate if it amounts to anything more than a belated recap of one of the most eventful periods in the city's history.

Curated by David Chan Ho-yeung, the former director of Shanghai Gallery of Art and Osage Gallery, the exhibition of sculptures, videos and photography takes its title - and pretty much its entire conceptual framework - from scholar Ackbar Abbas' Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, which was published four months before the 1997 handover, and is the canonical text on Hong Kong cultural studies since.

In the book, Abbas examined the various forms and practices - including cinema, architecture, photography and writing - used in Hongkongers' search for cultural identity in the transitional period between the 1984 signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the handover.

With the concept of déjà disparu, Abbas famously reconsidered our viewing process by highlighting the tendency of local filmmakers to construct images out of clichés - a process the academic described as "reverse hallucination" or "not seeing what is there".

"It would of course seem that we've already dealt with all the colonial and post-colonial issues in the 1990s, although I feel that it's time to look at them again," says Chan of his approach for the show, which features works that were exhibited back in the day.