Sophia Law Suk-mun is determined to bring back art made by boatpeople in Hong Kong
Sophia Law wants to retrieve works created by boatpeople for archiving in Hong Kong, writes Kylie Knott
Sophia Law Suk-mun flicks through her iPad revealing a collection of paintings that weigh heavily on the heart.
In one, a forlorn-looking woman, baby in her arms, stands behind a barbed-wire fence. Another shows people in drab clothes inside a giant cage. Viewers would be forgiven for thinking the paintings depicted scenes from a prison - and they would be painfully close to the truth.
While each image sends an overwhelming message of despair, the link is that all were part of an Art In Camps (AIC) project set up by local non-profit group Garden Streams and funded by the United Nations. The project focused on Vietnamese boatpeople living in Hong Kong's many detention centres between 1988 and 1991. The spotlight was on the Whitehead Detention Centre, one of the most crowded refugee camps during the 1980s and which, at one point, held more than 24,000 detainees.
For those boatpeople, art making, as a kind of image writing, expressed what seemed impossible to articulate
Concerned with the boatpeople's psychological needs, the Garden Streams project created platforms for inmates to express themselves through art. More than 800 pieces - paintings, recordings, poems and so on - were collected, forming a creative memory of a vital piece of Hong Kong's history that started on May 3, 1975, when the then British colony received its first wave of boatpeople fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon a month earlier.
Many fled in small boats and many died at sea, leaving survivors with horrific memories. When the first boat carrying 3,743 people landed in Hong Kong, it was the beginning of a 25-year chain of events that would see thousands arrive in the city (between 1975 and 1995, Hong Kong received about 223,302 boatpeople).
Many went on to settle in the West, but those who stayed found they had become a political hot potato: open "come-and-go-as-you-like" settlements became closed camps and in 1989 the Hong Kong government implemented forced repatriation.
Conditions in these prison-like camps were appalling. "As well as the physical suffering from constant noise, crowding, violence and abuse, the boatpeople were tormented psychologically by the uncertainty of their future and the tragic memories of their past," says Law.
For Law, the artwork from the AIC project became a huge source of inspiration for her first book, The Invisible Citizens of Hong Kong: Art and Stories of Vietnamese Boatpeople, which will be released next month by Chinese University Press. In the book, Law combines stories taken from historical archives with the personal drawings, and while the collection serves as a creative snapshot of that time, it has also become a source of frustration.