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2 - Power Plays: Alternative Performance Art and Urban Space in the Political Life of the City
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In the decade since the handover, political life in Hong Kong has entered the realm of the performative. Political perspectives have moved beyond debate in broadcast media and institutional forums to emerge in performances in the public sphere — alternative art actions and performance artworks about social and political issues — that have taken corporeal shape in the life of the city, in the spaces of daily life and in demonstrations and marches, across the island, from park to town and in the heart of the city’s zones of connectivity and mobility, culminating in demonstrations at the Star Ferry and Queen’s Piers in 2006–2007. From individual artists and cultural workers and small groups to crowds in the hundreds of thousands, people have organized and created community events, art actions and alternative art forms to express a range of local, regional and national concerns. This assessment of performance art and the political in Hong Kong examines artworks and related social actions by Hong Kong artists, cultural workers and activists that have enlivened the cultural and political life of the city. It focuses on contemporary and alternative performance works concerned 2 Power Plays: Alternative Performance Art and Urban Space in the Political Life of the City Carolyn Cartier* * The author wishes to thank and give particular acknowledgement to the artists whose work appears in this essay, especially to Anthony Leung Po-shan, whose comments on an earlier draft of the essay yielded several important points of interpretation; to Wen Yau, who provided the introduction to the performance art collection of the Asia Art Archive and corrections to the essay; to Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng Yeeman for sharing documentation of their history of performance art; and to Dawn Lau and Serina Poon at Hong Kong University Press for their collaboration in producing the illustrations for the chapter. The interpretations expressed in the essay and any limitations or errors they may represent are the responsibility of the author alone. ch02(025-040).indd 25 25/05/2010 2:59 PM 26 Carolyn Cartier with expressions of social and political realities in post-handover Hong Kong, and takes an open approach to understanding performance art and art actions as expressions of the expansion of cultural activity and political experience in Hong Kong society and as part of the process of production of art. The analysis considers especially artworks that incorporate text and images related to the institutional dynamics of the formation of the Hong Kong SpecialAdministrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In this context — a historically unprecedented territorial formation and a political movement geared to increasing democratic practice — alternative performance art and art actions contribute to the articulation of an urban cultural politics with national dimensions and a spatial expression in public life. Reflecting our focus on word and image, this discussion focuses on performance artworks concerned specifically with text, speech acts, statements and enactments, and those whose use of images or representational images have resonated beyond their moments of production to become known among artists and the art-viewing public as a consequence of social documentation. This outlook, however, is actually at odds with definitional views of the performance art genre, whose theorists have posited that its “only life is in the present”; and that it “cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations [because] once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (Phelan, 1993, p. 146). While documentary forms of performance artworks are no substitute for direct experience, in this highly mediatized era, alternative performance art is increasingly recorded and, for example, videos of performance art are now collectable. This discussion relies on the social documentation of performance art, and draws on the performance art archive of the Asia Art Archive, whose researcher and curator, Wen Yau, is herself a performance artist and thus involved in the social production of contemporary and alternative performance art in Hong Kong. Some of her works, in addition to those of other contemporary artists and cultural activists, are introduced below. Interest in the production of art in the city differs from the perspectives of art critics or art historians focusing primarily on artworks, because we find some of the most creative politics in Hong Kong in the first decade of the “postcolonial era” in the dynamics of art actions performed in public spaces and in the dedication of artists to humanistic concerns about identity formation and its (in)stability under the...