How artists challenged censorship and urbanisation at Art Basel Hong Kong

The Tuesday that Art Basel Hong Kong opened to VIPs, far away from the air-conditioned exhibition hall containing billions of dollars worth of art, a smaller artist event was happening. Hong Kong raised and based artist Ko Siu Lan was ready to unveil an interactive performance recording, centering on Chinese prayer wheels, to question dissipating boundaries between China and Hong Kong. He exhibited the piece at Art Central, a small independent art fair running concurrently to the seventh edition of Hong Kong Art Basel.

The artist told The Art Newspaper that day: “It is an undeniable fact that Hong Kong is undergoing rapid ‘mainlandification’ … Through Hong Kong authorities, the Chinese government is also extending its influence in the education, legal and cultural system.” In February this year, the Chinese government announced plans to transform nine mainland cities including Hong Kong into the ‘greater Bay Area.’ Lan and other Hong Kong-based artists worry that the growth and urbanisation of Hong Kong will impact the notably light censorship in the city compared to the rest of China. In the wake of this decision, Hong Kong-based Claire Hsu, co-founder of the not-for-profit Asia Art Archive, told me “there is a nostalgia for Hong Kong.” Hsu has been on the judging panel for The BMW Journey prize at Art Basel Hong Kong for the last five years.

“Hong Kong has always appealed to me,” Korean artist Lee Bul said when we spoke on the Wednesday preview day. “When I first came, it reminded me of J.G. Ballard’s books, which I’m hugely influenced by, like Concrete Island. It also reminded me of Blade Runner. But now? It’s very different to how it was then. Even in the last twenty years since I’ve been coming here regularly, I’ve noticed that the city is more of a concrete jungle than ever. The increase in urbanisation is something that you can’t help but notice. This is something that I’m of course very interested in.”

This issue, one of the most pressing for the creative industries in Hong Kong, is something that Art Basel seemed to skim over. After all, why wouldn’t it, when it’s a fair that has benefitted widely from urbanisation? But it’s something that independently both the smaller galleries and huge art world names looked at closely, with artists like Mit Jai Inn, Candice Lin, Lee Bul and Elmgreen & Dragset probing the subject.

For the fair’s seventh edition, the Encounters section, curated for the fourth time by Alexie Glass-Kantor, director of Art Space Sydney, invited artists to look at the politics of civic responsibility. Titled Still We Rise, Glass-Cantor wanted to look at “the ways in which an artist can suggest transformation, growth and renewal. There is significant social and political change across Asia, I wanted to look at the ways we can grow in that climate.”

The artist’s interpretations were frustratingly loose at times. But there were clear successes, largely by Asia-Pacific artists. Lee Bul’s installation was an extension of her work Willing to be Vulnerable, shown at Gropius Bau in Berlin late last year — an imposing silver Zeppelin hanging over the fair, created in the image of footage of the 1937 airship crash in Hindenburg, USA. “I am interested in the idea of vulnerability as political. I’ve always been interested in dystopia. I don’t see the Zeppelin as a negative thing. I think it actually inspires hope and suggests a way to move forward.” Elmgreen & Dragset created a 20-foot long sci-fi style city landscape which they suspended upside down above a mirror, reflecting a distorted image of an imagined city.

Planes (Electric) by Thai artist Mit Jai Inn asked people to walk through a curved hallway covered in thick congealed rainbow coloured paint to great effect while Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak took a timely look at the literal and symbolic concept of walls and urban boundaries in his fabric piece The Walls.

“It’s been twenty years since the handover of Hong Kong. I think there is fear about what parts of Hong Kong are being lost,” Hsu told me. “As we become more global, or standardised, we are losing the characteristics that make a place what it is.” When I ask Hsu about the artists recently speaking out against ‘mainlandification,’ she is frank in her response. “I think people are nostalgic for Hong Kong, but it’s very important that we see that Hong Kong had a colonial history that we shouldn’t view as something to look back on with nostalgia.”

Hsu is on the board of the BMW Art Journey prize, where for the last five years she’s focused on gender, geography and historically how those aspects have impacted diversity in the Asia-Pacific arts. On Thursday, Hsu and five other panelists including Matthias Mühling (Director of Städtische Galerie Im Lenbachhaus) Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (President of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo) Philip Tinari (Director of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art) and last year’s winner, Samson Young, selected Clarissa Tossin, Lu Yang and Sheng Xin as their shortlist.

Hsu has been an advocate of what she calls “a more generous view of Asian art history” since she began work on the Asia Art Archive twenty years ago. “It used to be that 20th century Asian history was spoke about from a European-Western perspective. Our work means making primary documents available for research, scholarship and learning, from Pakistan to Vietnam.” Hsu spoke about the importance of performance art amidst the “mainlandification” of Hong Kong and its impact on artists and censorship. “Performance has been so important for Chinese art, especially within the context of censorship here. Someone like Lee Wen, who we have on show at the Asia Art Archive, has such an important practice.” On Thursday, during Art Basel opening week, the West Kowloon Cultural District held a press conference to mark the recently opened Xiqu Centre, the first performing arts space in Hong Kong.

As conversations surface about the long-term impact of a centralised art fair like Art Basel Hong Kong on the grassroots art scene across the city, Hsu sees the benefit of the fair as providing a showcase for Asian contemporary art where, historically, there hasn’t been one in Hong Kong. “It’s interesting to look at the demographics as to who is coming”, she says. “There are many people coming from Asia who are also learning about Asian countries. The fair is a good place to do that.”

This is true. Across the fair there was much brilliant work by Asia-Pacific artists. A lot of these were in the Insights section, a concept that “brings together 21 galleries presenting solo and curatorial projects developed by artists from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region.” This seems like a sweeping curatorial theme, as nonsensical as presenting artists from Europe, but if you can look past that there was some good work on show presented by galleries including Johyun from Busan, Baton from Seoul and Mind Set from Taipei. Particularly good was Shun Chu-Chen’s photographs Condolences Series, images of tropical flowers with Chinese towels pinned to them and Michael Lin’s booth-engulfing red metal sculpture at Bank Gallery. Wider across the fair, Liu Xiaodong’s painting of female family members Memory Tree drew a never ending crowd. “Historically we haven’t really had big institutions for contemporary art in Hong Kong,” Hsu says. “It’s only a few days a year, but I think it has ignited the imaginons of people in the city.”

Monika Sprüth, co-founder of Sprüth Magers Gallery, agrees. In lieu of a main contemporary art museum, seeing artists at Art Basel Hong Kong is a rare chance to explore Asia-Pacific contemporary art under one roof. Sprüth emailed me: “Of extreme importance are historical positions like Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Bul and Haegue Yang. The society is quite male dominated here, so we think artists from the younger generation like Cao Fei and Guan Xiao are very interesting with strong positions and influence.”

It was Candice Lin’s shop front installation — constructed from sheetrock, wood, and barbed wire, with tobacco, snake oil, ink on paper and ceramics — for François Ghebaly that gave a nice example of how a great artist can exhibit at an art fair within largely commercial curatorial ideologies and still triumph as a wunderkind. Lin both took part in the fair and held it at a distance. Looking at the history of colonialism in China and the indentured labour ‘coolie’ trade of Chinese labourers who were brought to America, it was a critique that was both at home and appreciated at the fair, but also gave a side eye to it.

Art Basel Hong Kong runs until Sunday 31 March at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre