Urban Mediations in Hong Kong Contemporary Art: Notes on A Very Good City and Local Orientation

Over the last decade, contemporary art in Hong Kong, informed by travel(ing) theory, the special administrative region's ambiguous (post)colonial-national-global connections, and its inimitable set of historical and cultural problems, has been preoccupied with the themes of mobility, transition, and location in its re-presentations of the city.¹ This fixation, or rather, the urgency of its mediation in not only artistic but also cultural, economic, and political spheres, is inextricably linked to an ongoing elaboration of a place identity for Hong Kong. However, present-day meanings attributed to place—with all its local idiosyncrasies and cultural forms—are manifold, complicated by a changing sense of place, of attachment to any particular locality, in both public and critical discourses that acknowledge the modern displacements of contemporary subjectivity. As David Harvey writes, "the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication."²

This essay critically examines the way two media works of art explore the changing sense of place in Hong Kong and its implications for constructing an identity for the city through issues of mobility and location. In contrast to the small number of recent studies on Hong Kong film and video that have focused on mobility as key themes, I look at two media works that explore this notion with different modalities of interaction closely linked to the search for a place identity.³ Owing to the scarcity of published critical texts on contemporary art in Hong Kong related to this specific topic, my analysis is based on interviews with the artists as well as writings on urban theory and cultural geography. For the purposes of this essay, place is defined by a set of intersecting social practices operating at a range of spatial scales (distance, copresence, settings, differential mobility) at a given time and particular location that manifest themselves as localized specificities and differences.⁴ Place identity refers to the distinctive identity of a place that "emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultural construction as a community or locality" in the traditional or imagined sense.⁵ In this context, the place identity of Hong Kong correlates a "changing sense of the ‘local'" with a (re)imag(in)ing of the city that takes into account its historical specificities of transit(ion) and current developments in the global formation.⁶

The recent intensification of globalization processes—the transnational hypercirculation of people, money, ideas, and images—has radically changed relationships between place and identity, history and memory, belonging, local specificities and translocal urban spaces. In the adoption of a vision of a "borderless world," to use economist Kenichi Ohmae's phrase, these processes tend to valorize mobile subjectivity as a normative condition for the contemporary subject, ignoring and subsequently leveling the differences between geographically mobile categories such as tourists, cosmopolites, migrants, refugees, exiles, and guest workers, and their particular experiences of movement under specific historical and cultural circumstances.⁷ Connected to these developments is the notion of nonplace, a construct of technological speed proposed by anthropologist Marc Augé. According to Augé, the present historical moment is marked by the most profound acceleration of change ever felt in history—hence the increased proliferation of nonplaces, or spaces of transit, such as airports, hotels, shopping malls, highways, and theme parks. Hong Kong, for example, is often said to exemplify the nonplace construct of "the city as airport."⁸ Yet though "never totally completed" (place is "never completely erased") even nonplaces are losing ground.⁹ With the influx of virtual communications technology, space no longer needs to be physically negotiated, time is further distanced, and the contemporary subject is said to be in an...