How extradition law protest art took over a Chinese curator’s Hong Kong exhibition

When an arts writer in Shanghai submitted an exhibition proposal to Hong Kong’s Para Site for its emerging curators programme at the contemporary art space this summer, her intention wasn’t to delve into local politics. After all, Zhang Hanlu has never lived in Hong Kong and knew little about the place and its people.

The original idea for an exhibition called “The Bicycle Thieves” came from the 1948 Italian film of the same name that followed a father and son as they searched desperately for their stolen bicycle – the father’s sole means of making a living.

In choosing the works of 16 local and international artists and groups, the aim of 30-year-old Zhang is to explore whether the precarious existence of the proletariat, deprived of control over traditional means of production, has improved with the digital age, sharing economy and globalisation.

Some of the exhibits have to do with how artists are experimenting with their own roles – as “service providers” and as activists, for example – and that’s why there is a large section in the exhibition about the protests in Hong Kong against proposed changes to extradition law, put together by members of the Hong Kong Artist Union.

“The Hong Kong perspective is very important to this exhibition and I wanted to find out what local artists are doing as part of my investigation into the changing nature of labour. When I talked to the union members about the exhibition, they said what they were doing right now was being on the streets, protesting against the government’s extradition bill,” Zhang says.

She chose the large reading room in Para Site’s space in a Quarry Bay industrial building with windows looking out on to King’s Road for the union’s display of protest paraphernalia.

“We have deliberately placed this section of the exhibition here because it is important for what we show here to be tied to the reality outside,” Zhang says. Included are protest T-shirts, placards, Yeung Yang’s manifesto linking the protests to the raison d'être of contemporary art – a refusal of what the authorities deem “normal” and an insistence on thinking freely and differently – and art students’ sketches that record the fast-moving scenes on the streets at a time when photography was discouraged for fear of incriminating protesters.

When the beliefs of artists and protesters align, the two roles overlap.

In some of the work featured in the exhibition, artists temporarily adopt the persona of another to highlight the old and new class differences in today’s economy. Since 2007, Hong Kong artist Luke Ching Chin-wai has been fighting for blue-collar shift workers’ right to sit down during long shifts – a right so basic that the mere fact that it needs arguing says a lot about the lack of dignity and voice among workers on hourly pay and have no union representation.

As part of his research and documentation, Ching takes on jobs such as being a security guard in public museums and a cashier in supermarkets. The resulting artworks, with photographs and texts, did double duty as a highly visible public campaign – one that worked: retailers and museums now provide seats for their most low-paid staff.

In his 2011 video called Workers Leaving the Googleplex (which references the Lumiere Brothers’ 1895 film called Workers Leaving the Factory), American artist Andrew Norman Wilson captures the “plus ça change” nature of the internet economy.

He filmed and narrated his experience as a contractor at Google who belonged to an invisible inferior caste identified by the yellow badges they wear. These badge wearers are barred from any contact with full employees at the Google campus and do not receive any of their benefits.

The job itself is tedious. He scanned pages of books for the Google Books digital archives – a factory-line production that only becomes visible when there are human errors. These moments of errors are captured in a series of photographs that Wilson has compiled – the gloved finger of a worker peeping through in the corner of a scanned page, a wrinkle in the paper.

Distance and imagination are just as important to the power of art as direct experience and participation. Zhang has shrewdly placed a section on “Dark Fluid”, a science fiction project led by Hong Kong artist Angela Su, next to the Hong Kong Artist Union display to highlight the fact that political art can be grounded as well as unshackled from reality.

There are moments of levity, too, such as French-Chinese artist Yao Qingmei’s The Trial (2013), in which she plays a raging Marxist launching a diatribe against a pop-soda vending machine and its capitalist sins. Taiwan-born artist Yunyu “Ayo” Shih believes that, in the not-too-distant future, most households will have a custom-made robot domestic helper; he “launched” a new product called the Domestic Robot Keana-35® (Hong Kong) as part of the exhibition, along with a manual that has a chapter on the hygiene and cleaning of sexual organ parts.

It is frustrating that there is so little here about the plight of the proletariat within the one big communist power left in the world. After all, Para Site exhibitions always excel at providing meaningful insight into countries through their artists, and the curator is from Shanghai.

In sharp contrast to the specificity of the art about Hong Kong and of Wilson’s observations at Google, the works by China-born artists in the show (most of whom are living abroad) tend to be international in their subject matter, broad-brush in their approach, and oblique.

Still, as an art exhibition, “The Bicycle Thieves” is nonetheless timely, engaging and thought-provoking. Hong Kong can certainly do with more cross-border cultural collaboration of this kind.

The Bicycle Thieves, Para Site, 22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Building, 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, 12pm-7pm, Wed to Sun. Until Sept. 1.