Johnson Chang marks 30 years at the forefront of the Chinese contemporary art scene

Most people who need to do so eventually end up using the same word to describe Johnson Chang Tsong-zung: “pioneer”. Thirty years ago, in the cultural desert that was Hong Kong, he opened a gallery called Hanart TZ. The initials TZ – from his Chinese name – distinguished it from an earlier Hanart Gallery he’d set up with a friend, artist Harold Wong, in 1977. The original Hanart, which closed in 1990, showcased classical Chinese painting.

The new one, emphatically, did not.

From the beginning, Chang was determined to link Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. He wanted to understand not only Chinese identity but how Chinese contemporary culture could be defined from a perspective that was simultaneously Asian but – Hong Kong being a British colony – outside Asia. The political anomaly of Hong Kong also meant he could bring China out of China and, in January 1989, he organised an exhibition called “The Stars: 10 Years”.

The Stars were a radical Beijing art group who, in 1979, having been denied official exhibition space, hung their work on park railings. One of them was a man called Ai Weiwei. Another was Wang Keping. During the Hong Kong show, a play written by Wang was performed in the gallery, then located in a basement at the bottom of a block of flats in Kowloon.

“At that time, I innocently thought we could actually also try to create a mass market for contemporary art by producing boxes with limitededition paper cuts and prints from the artists,” he told the Asia Cultural Co-operation Forum, ruefully, in 2006. “And I think I still own most of those boxes because the artists did not supply the artwork.”

Things have moved on since then. These days, Hanart TZ is in the Pedder Building, along with some of the major international hitters in the art world: Gagosian, Simon Lee, Ben Brown. The gallery’s gone through several locations since that Kowloon basement, including the old Bank of China Building and the Henley Building, on Queen’s Road. Chang, however, now 62, has barely changed. David Tang, of Shanghai Tang fame, and who is a friend, once described him as “a tiny, skinny figure wearing days-old, unwashed, Chinese farmer’s clothing and looking like a crude commoner – but under the tattered outfit there is a great mind and great heart, surviving only for art”. That summation, mostly, still applies.

On a recent morning at Hanart TZ, Chang is in the mildly anguished throes of organising both an exhibition and a symposium for mid- January, to mark the gallery’s 30th anniversary. A hundred of the most significant artworks he’s collected over the years will be displayed under the title “Hanart 100: Idiosyncrasies”. These are being gathered from various warehouses, and one of the gallery’s back rooms is currently filled with old catalogues and boxes, one of which is labelled “Post 89 Work Files & Historical Documentation”.