The Interview

ANDREW KWONG is the artistic chap who threw red paint, mixed with some of his blood, over the Pillar of Shame on June 4. You probably heard about this: several camera crews and journalists were there to record the event. A couple of weeks later, on the day of the Dragonboat Festival, he attempted to throw himself into the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui, clad in a Mao suit. Once more the press had obligingly assembled to watch him making a splash but, alas, this time the spectacle didn't happen because the police turned up.

'I gave a press conference at 3.45 pm at the clock tower,' Kwong explained when I asked him what on earth he'd thought he was doing. 'I wanted to jump in at 4 pm, because the word 'four' sounds like 'to die'. I had no intention of dying, of course. There's a little balcony I was going to use but ATV couldn't film there, so, at the last minute, I changed my mind and that was my downfall. I was surrounded by 10 coppers.' Perhaps, I volunteered, that's because there's a police unit based right on the waterfront and the, er, coppers (Kwong is Hong Kong-born and Canadian-educated but 'I listen to the BBC quite a bit') were alerted by the phalanx of reporters jostling for position. 'I didn't know that,' cried Kwong, adding, 'unfortunately it only made three papers - Apple Daily, Ming Pao and the Hong Kong Standard.' Was there no Post coverage? 'The Post tries to be' - and here Kwong scratched the air to signal the arrival of conversational quotation marks and therefore, I imagine, heavy irony - 'middlebrow, aspiring to be highbrow.' We exchanged glances or, rather, I gazed deep into the dark glasses which Kwong refused to take off ('I have zombie eyes'), even though we were seated in the shadiest corner of Club 64. 'I know a lot of things I say sound pretentious,' he went on. 'I don't take myself seriously. Neither should you. Sometimes I don't know who I am, do you get that feeling?' In order to pin this shifting identity down, I thought I'd better ask for his card and he handed me two. The first read 'HKAEG (Hong Kong Art Exposition Group), Andrew Kwong, Executive Director' and the second, more chattily, read 'CyberArt, Andy Kwong' and was illustrated with a Warhol-esque image of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. 'This is by an artist called Gainsborough, fabulous name, who claims to be a descendant of Thomas Gainsborough.' Would Gainsborough, by any chance, be Chinese? 'Anglo-Chinese,' said Kwong, airily, and handed over a CD-Rom of Gainsborough's Diana work (produced, I couldn't help noticing, by HKAEG and bearing the stern dictum: 'Gainsborough is one of the great artists of our times', in English, French and German).

I wondered if Gainsborough might be available for an interview and Kwong said, 'He's a mystery, like Clint Eastwood in those spaghetti westerns, but he's got a promoter - me.' When I laughed, Kwong visibly relaxed. 'I love doing these interviews in English, in Cantonese they take everything literally, they think I'm a showboat. A hot dog. A self-promoter.' Is he? 'I refuse to feel irrelevant. I want to make a difference. But I don't make a point of being controversial. There's a higher calling - to make Hong Kong an art-friendly place. I'm trying to organise the first Hong Kong Art International Biennial, subject to funding of course. That's what all the publicity is about.' He returned here in 1994, after 27 years in Canada, 'to make money', which he does in some mysterious way connected to the construction industry. (I checked his hands for callouses and he said, crossly, 'I'm not a labourer. It's project management.' But a third name card was not produced.) How old is he? 'I'm 39. I look younger than that, don't I? I have a lively child-like fascination, a lively sensibility.' He has also a lively intolerance of those who query his provenance. He produced piles of information about his family for my edification, carefully annotating a photocopy from the Urban Council Reference Library about his great-uncle, Richard Charles Lee, as in Lee Garden Theatre - 'the Li Ka-shing of the 1960s and '70s'. In 1997, he organised a handover exhibition on Lantau 'featuring Hong Kong's finest artists', and people kept on asking him about his background and saying they'd never heard of him.

'So condescending. I'm fourth-generation Hong Kong and they're probably wet-backs, their fathers and mothers swam the Pearl River to get to Hong Kong.' I remarked that for a man who describes himself at every opportunity as 'the people's artist', he's not noticeably democratic and he looked startled and cried, 'Why do you say that? Because I refer to them as the masses? That is a bit derogatory, isn't it? But the name is an integral part of the art I do. When I threw the paint, I said, first in Chinese, then in English: 'I am the people, their blood is my blood.' You'll never get the people to listen, you have to do crazy things like jumping into the harbour. The Dragonboat Festival is in memory of a statesman who was falsely accused of treason. I'm on a crusade against corruption, it all ties in.' To this end, HKAEG is currently sponsoring a competition entitled 'Artists Against Corruption, Cronyism and Censorship'. Kwong handed me a press release about it, which took a large swipe at the Arts Development Council (ADC) in general and Benny Chia, chairman of the Visual Arts Committee and manager of the Fringe Club, in particular.

Kwong seems to be obsessed by Chia (memorably referred to in the press release as Benny 'Empress Dowager' Chia): he has issued two High Court Writs against him in the past two years. The first claimed that the ADC refused to sponsor the 1997 Lantau exhibition, which goes some way towards explaining why Kwong is so touchy about not being recognised. The council won the case. The second claims 'spiritual oppression, mental anguish and professional persecution', and Kwong is seeking damages in the region of $100 million.

I tut-tutted over this and Kwong said, defensively, 'In the West, you have Batman and Superman, they fight injustice and I'm similar to them. I fight corruption dressed in a Mao suit. Hong Kong is a kitsch town, it has a juvenile kind of culture, and I'm a reflection of that.' By being juvenile too? But Kwong wouldn't hear of any such talk. 'Certainly not. The discourse is very complex. Only on a superficial level can it be perceived as a stunt. I see myself as an agent provocateur who is trying to create a visible culture for the future of Hong Kong.' The Justice Department is still contemplating what to do about Kwong's escapades. Naturally, he's gleefully optimistic that there'll be a lovely, big hoo-hah: 'If they press charges, it'll be international news. You don't have to be an Einstein of the media to understand that.'