Revisiting the past

Which thing are we going to talk about?' asks Danny Yung Ning-tsun, clutching an iPad in his - rather bare - office at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity. Indeed. The room may look empty but Yung's schedule, as always, is full. To list the titles on his name card alone would take several paragraphs; to analyse the artistic output (sculpture, cartoons, opera, painting, experimental film, theatre, cross-cultural exchanges) of this indefatigable 67-year-old man would require an entire newspaper section.

So the conversation today is, supposedly, confined to two events: his art exhibition, 'In Search of New China' at 1a space, and his theatre production, One Hundred Years of Solitude 10.0 - Cultural Revolution, jointly produced by Singapore's Drama Box and Zuni Icosahedron, the experimental art collective he founded in 1982 and of which he is still artistic director.

Both projects appear to be works in progress associated with major anniversaries. The solo exhibition is his fourth re-working of a Mao-era photograph, widely disseminated as a poster by Xinhua in 1982, and is linked (certainly in the press release) to the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party. One Hundred Years of Solitude 10.0 neatly marks the centenary of the 1911 revolution; but it's also the 10th version of a series Zuni Icosahedron has been performing under that title from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book, for which the Colombian author won the Nobel Prize in, as it happens, 1982.

Is there a joint theme here of revisitation?

'Revisiting? Revisiting is very, very healthy,' he begins. 'It's an opportunity for a self-critique. The early 1980s was very exciting, I'm not saying now isn't, but that time was very open. There were a lot of experiments. We did encounter problems usually in the area of censorship. Nowadays, the key thing is self-censorship - when an artist says: 'I know the code and I'll work within it'.'

At the beginning of the 1980s, he was himself a re-visitor to the city. He'd been born in Shanghai, had moved to Hong Kong at the age of five but at 17, he went to the United States for his education and stayed there for 18 years. Yung has an unusual background for someone in the arts: he studied mathematics in Oregon, has a degree in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and a master's in urban design from Columbia. There's still something of the perpetual student about him, and also something of the 1960s counter-culturalist who witnessed a country - not his own - questioning itself.

'So many demonstrations!' he says. 'The locals shielded us from the media because foreign students could get deported for taking part. There was a whole movement happening, a questioning about who created the system, the relationship between us and society.'

The 'us' wasn't simply youth: it included ethnic minorities and Yung sought part of a grant from the Ford Foundation to do a report on New York's Chinatown, out of which came policy change and, in 1971, the Basement Workshop, the East Coast's first Asian-American arts and cultural organisation. Say what you like about Yung, he's never deviated from building on a core passion. He came back to Hong Kong because, he says, he took a year off, then stayed.

'In the early 1980s, every single foreign country was interested in Hong Kong - there was a French film week, German film week, Swedish. It was almost like before the Boxer Revolution!' Is that an altogether good comparison? 'No!' Yung laughs. 'It's a bad one. But it was multicultural. I was adviser to many festivals.'

He also had the advantage of being able to go in and out of the mainland and he was there when the doctored poster of a Mao photo - with Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhu De, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai - began appearing in 1982.

The first time he Photoshopped all those heads to show shifts in the Communist Party power structure ('What's truth? What's reality?' he says), the Hong Kong photographic journal in which the images appeared in 1992 was banned in China.

'Earlier this year,' he says, 'I was in Beijing and a gallery owner talked about doing it and I said I'd been banned and he said: 'Come on! Everyone's playing with political figures!'' That truth - evident to anyone who's spent five minutes looking at contemporary Chinese art - suggests a certain quaintness in Yung's mindset. He says he'll create another variation on the photo - a box with six small boxes inside, making mathematical dice of each head, to suggest the chance shuffling of power - but perhaps, in this case, he should start thinking outside the box.

How do you remain avant-garde, however, when the world is running so swiftly ahead of you? One Hundred Years of Solitude 10.0 will include reflections on what's going on in the Middle East, as well as Asia; one wishes him luck as director and scriptwriter because on the day of this interview, no one had much of a clue as to what was happening in Libya. (Or Syria. Or Iran. And Egypt was looking a little restless again ...)

The joint production, he says, could be called A Tale of Two Cities. He believes Singapore has made more of an effort than Hong Kong on the arts front. 'They are their own boss, Hong Kong is not,' he states. 'Whatever Beijing says, our government listens.' As a board member of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority - emphatically not running swiftly ahead - he's learning to think big. And positive.

'This is not a waste of time,' he says of the ongoing delay. 'It's a time for discussion. How about we negotiate with Unesco to have their headquarters in Hong Kong? It's in Paris and the French are not rich ... Hong Kong could be the Geneva of Asia!'

When his optimism is admired he declares: 'It's not being optimistic or pessimistic. Arts education is not about teaching people to sing or dance, it's about teaching them to think critically and to know what we're doing. Then we just do it.'

One Hundred Years of Solitude 10.0 - Cultural Revolution
Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Sept 16-17

In Search of New China
1A space, Unit 14 Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, Kowloon
Sept 20 - Nov 10