A curator’s crucial perspective on Hong Kong’s burgeoning art scene in the 1980s and 1990s

The Art Newspaper reviews Oscar Ho Hing-kay’s book Hong Kong Art: A Curator’s History (1987–2004), which uses a memoir-like, first-person curatorial perspective to chart Hong Kong’s contemporary art scene around the 1997 handover from the UK to China. Ho describes returning from graduate studies in California in the 1980s to a city where contemporary artists were marginal, recounting disputes such as sculptor Van Lau rejecting works by Ho and Ricky Yeung Sau Churk as not “sculpture,” and artist Chan Ching Wah spray-painting her own painting black at a Hong Kong Art Biennial opening in protest. The book highlights the 1987 exhibition Out of Context as a key moment for installation, performance, and photography, including a two-day performance by Ricky Yeung in which he chained himself in a bamboo cage, half-naked and covered in blood-red paint. Much of the narrative centers on Ho’s tenure as artistic director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre (1988–2001), when he sought to demonstrate that Hong Kong had a serious cultural identity despite being labeled a “cultural desert.”

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