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Hong Kong artists elected as district councillors on city’s identity issues and boosting the local arts scene
- Three district councillors from the arts world talk about Hong Kong people’s renewed sense of identity and how that motivated them to stand for election
- They fear threats to artists’ freedom of expression and explain how they want to help raise the visibility of Hong Kong’s arts scene
Reading Time:4 minutes
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A good part of Clara Cheung’s artistic practice over the last 15 years has been engaged with the evolution of Hong Kong people’s sense of identity.
She says that before the 1997 handover, which saw the city returned from British to Chinese sovereignty, many exhibitions, art projects and journals – both local and international – spoke about local Hong Kong identity. But post-Handover, these dried up for a number of years.
“It was interesting to me to see after 1997 there was a gap – you didn’t find so much discussion about local identity any more,” says Cheung, who was recently elected district councillor for Wan Chai district’s Happy Valley constituency. “Now when we look back it was a quiet moment for everyone, including Beijing, the local government and the Hong Kong people.”
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It was not until late 2006, when the decision to demolish the 50-year-old Star Ferry pier in Central sparked a protest movement to protect it, that the concept of local identity began to resurface, Cheung says. It was particularly evident during the 2014 umbrella movement that paralysed the city’s financial district and gave rise to the now familiar slogan: “I want true universal suffrage.”
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“Who is ‘I’? Who am ‘I’? During the umbrella movement, we kept emphasising ‘I and me’ but we didn’t exactly know how to express it. Nowadays, we know who we are – there is no identity struggle,” Cheung says.
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