No blinkers: Hong Kong history retold through video art retrospective
Curator from Beijing who’s assembled 30 years of Hong Kong video art seeks to offer a view of past events that goes beyond the usual narrow story framed by events before and after the handover
“No References”, a retrospective of Hong Kong video art since 1985 at Videotage in To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, is more than a study of how one particular art form developed in the city. It is a chance to get a more nuanced view of local history at a time when many people are rethinking what it means to be a Hongkonger, the show’s curator – who is from Beijing – says.
Su Wei, an independent curator who now splits his time between the capital and Hong Kong, says that, as a relative outsider, he is dismayed by the extent to which intellectual discussion of local history is imprisoned by a grand narrative framed by the 1997 handover and a few political and economic landmarks.
“The telling of Hong Kong history is usually divided into pre-1997, post-1997 and so on. The critical discourse applied to local art also tends to focus on things like local identity or the urban landscape, which is very restricting. I think micro angles are important in understanding real history,” he says.
It is an intriguing approach. But it remains to be seen how a collection that focuses on, as Su says, “the subjectivity” of individual artists, with no overarching theme, will come across as cohesive.
The list of artists involved reads like a who’s who of Hong Kong video art, and among the highlights are updated versions of seminal pieces from the early days of both video art and performance art that may indeed shed light on how our collective sense of self has evolved.