Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Urbis, Manchester
18 January – 31 August
Reviewed by: Diana Yeh
Bleached light dwindles on blinds. Out of a darkened homely space, a voice softened by years utters forth. Sightless visions of the past shift from storyteller to told, both unseen: “It’s not possible. I don’t think you can find out.”
Stubbornly silent images of her father’s hometown in the Pearl River Delta, today a major manufacturing base, refuse to yield to his richly voiced memories of the past, in Mayling To’s engaging piece, The Land Behind (2007). An apt caution for anyone seeking to ‘find’ Hong Kong by visiting this show. Satisfyingly, ‘Arrivals and Departures’ transpire as much in resonances between works as in the dislocations, disappearances and missed connections determining Hong Kong’s presence in the show. Displaced by economic imperatives, it appears in Britain in red flags puncturing a huge table map, marking every Chinese restaurant/takeaway in the land, in Anthony Key’s The Battle of Britain (2006). Close-by, Bok Gwai (2005), a fragile kitchen built from flattened out takeaway cartons, creased like worked skin, speaks histories ghosted by generations and geographies.
Elsewhere, endless repetitions of similar imagined Hong Kongs work to undermine themselves: thousands of skyscrapers in a collection of postcards to Britain by artistic collective Community Museum Project; a profusion of painted Disneylands, Jackie Chans and Bruce Lees in Made in Shenzhen (2006), fifty-odd pieces of ‘tourist art’ by Leung Mee Ping and the trade painters with whom she trained for this work; a series of sketches of the artist Yuen Fong Ling and his family by volunteers in a life-drawing class, mirrored by framed photos of the class at work. Hong Kong finds itself in the sightlessness of our ways of seeing.
Reclaimed from international/colonial politics, it loses and re-finds itself in closed-in urban landscapes. Marked for demolition/development, Lee Tung Street (2005/7) is impossibly ‘salvaged’ as whole in a vinyl banner by the Community Museum. Individual prints of units are on sale, proceeds destined for the Street’s residents’ group, in art’s attempt to contribute to social action. While Stella So’s Lonely Moon Tram (2006) doodles an energetic vernacular, resistance to the urgent tempo of the city’s trafficscape is comically performed by Pak Sheung-chuen as he slow-walks zebra crossings.
Curated by Sally Lai, Yuen Fong Ling (UK), Howard Chan and Siu King-Chung (Hong Kong), this exhibition marks the tenth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover/re-unification. This, and its selection of ‘five British Chinese and five Hong Kong-based artists’, might prepare us for the partiality of the ‘new art’ perspectives on show: less Hong Kong an international hub radiating in all directions than the tip of a triangulated route to/from Britain and China. Eclipsed from the title, however, no doubt in a strategic move within continuing curatorial conundrums over nation-states/ethnicities, this unspecified itinerary risks its own blind-spots and hegemonies, but is at the same time what moves us in directions that makes this show so exciting.
Writer detail:
Diana Yeh
Venue detail:
Urbis
Cathedral Gardens, MANCHESTER M4 3BG
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