KITH Tsang Tak-ping's studio in Central is crammed full of broken furniture, boxes, bottles and old clothes that he has found on the street. It is not just a place to work but a work of art in itself.
'The people who live round here are so rich, they are always throwing things out,' he says. 'With friends and relatives just leaving and abandoning everything because of 1997, I wanted to surround myself with old things that remind me of my roots here. I wanted to show that you can't put everything that matters in a suitcase and go.' Political upheaval can be good for the arts. As Orson Welles put it in the film The Third Man : 'In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.' The effect of 1997 on Hong Kong's visual artists has been unpredictable. The change of sovereignty has not inspired anything resembling an overtly political school of art. Instead, the transition is being marked by a visible retreat into subject matter that is highly personal.
The major visual arts show at this year's Fringe festival, Restricted Exposure - Private Content: Public View, aims to reflect this trend.
'Many local artists seem to be reverting back into themselves and looking at their own experiences in the face of changing times,' says Lisa Cheung See-man, the Fringe's visual arts co-ordinator. 'Much of this highly personal work is an expression of great uncertainty. We wanted to bring them together and explore if this was the effect of 1997.' Ms Cheung approached local artists who were already known for their autobiographical subject matter and also searched for more. She spent two months gathering as broad a range of autobiographical work as possible - in some very different media.
The contents of Tsang's studio will become an installation, having been transported to the City Hall Exhibition Hall. Other subject matter includes old family photographs, a biscuit tin and even sanitary towels. It may sound random, but the work is united by nature of its intimacy.
'Often it has felt like I am looking into an artist's private photo album or chest of drawers,' says Ms Cheung. 'They are dealing with their identity, their family, society and how things are changing for them.' The photographer Holly Lee's work, for example, deals directly with her own identity and her past. She creates powerful images by superimposing photographs of herself at different stages in her life on to older pictures of her relatives, sometimes in negative - looking like ghosts.
'I wanted to stop and think about life and ask why we have to push and progress,' she says. 'I wanted to be reminded of lost times. I'm looking at how we relate to each other, it's a way of expressing feelings I can't put into words.