How Hong Kong arts projects will revive interest in heritage buildings

For years, physical traces of history in Hong Kong were scrubbed off like dead skin in a Turkish bath. In a city fixated with development, the few old buildings that are still standing are all the more precious for surviving the purge, worthy of frequent obeisance amid a rising tide of local cultural pride. Yet, many heritage buildings that are open to the public for free, struggle to draw visitors.

Take Law Uk Folk Museum for example. A rare 18th-century Hakka village house a few minutes’ walk from Chai Wan MTR station, it received just 13,000 visitors in the last financial year, or less than 0.2 per cent of Hong Kong’s population.

Cultivating mass interest in museums of any kind is a work in progress here, but at folk museums like the Laws’ old house, formulaic and unchanging displays of simple, wooden furniture and wooden farming tools, accompanied by flat, textbook-style descriptions and videos, inevitably fail to inspire.

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Just how do you create exhibitions that evoke the sense of a place and provide an absorbing narrative about the interplay of private lives and broader history? Try calling in a few artists.

About a year ago, the government’s Art Promotion Office paired four local artists with four historic houses – in Law Uk, Wong Uk, Sam Tung Uk and Kom Tong Hall – and the results are now being revealed to the public.