Mobility, Movement, and Spaces

A spatial mapping of the three artists’ mobility and movement in Hong Kong during the late 1980s and 1990s that foregrounds their agency in shaping their artistic identity through building art spaces.

While we read and review the Time Capsules vigorously, the student projects have yet to be fact-checked in their totality. We are sharing them openly as they are with the intention of building different thresholds from which others may discover new ideas for future research or build on existing explorations. We welcome your feedback, dialogue, and discussion. This project was originally published in August 2020. Last updated November 2025.

By spatially mapping the movement and mobility of three women artists in Hong Kong during specific periods of their careers, my timeline foregrounds the artists’ agency in shaping their artistic identity through building art spaces. Against a linear temporal approach to art history, spatial mapping provokes considerations on how physical and conceptual space influenced art in Hong Kong. Choi Yan Chi 蔡仞姿 (b.1949), Ellen Pau 鮑藹倫 (b.1961), and May Fung 馮美華 (b.1952) are well-established artists who worked in different capacities within and beyond the local art circle. The three artists were selected because they are institution builders who created spaces to make and display art, forming a foundation for the art community that connected artists within and across generations. As founders of cultural organisations, the artists exercised greater autonomy over the display and hence the production of their works. In this way, institutions acted as anchors for the artists to move around the art circle and existed as extensions of their artistic identities that correspond to the artists’ oeuvre.

The three artists studied in this project are leaders with their own visions for Hong Kong art which they realised through their art practice and the institutions they established.[1] As pioneers, these artists had to take on multiple roles to complete the art ecology.[2] Recognising the need for an infrastructure to support and sustain art-making, the artists created art institutions with visions that echoed their own artistic paths. For instance, Videotage’s international focus and its organisation of the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival reflects its founder, Ellen Pau’s, artistic positioning as an international artist.[3] It also hosts VMAC, the first archive of multimedia works in Hong Kong, aligning with Pau’s concern over the lack of documentation of art in Hong Kong.[4] The experimental vision of 1a space runs parallel with Choi Yan Chi’s avant-garde spirit which can be understood through her “cross-media experimentations” meant as a means for her to “grow beyond (her) “frames” of creation.”.[5] Spaces at the Art and Culture Outreach (ACO), including a bookstore and rooftop garden, attests to its mission to “encourage alternative reading” and “advocate green living,” embodying May Fung’s advocations.[6] In an interview in 1998, Fung proclaimed the importance of extensive reading to her learning process as a self-taught artist.[7] Ecological concern is a recurring theme in Fung’s works, including her Eco-Psycho series of which Sweet Life (2000–02, fig. 1) is part of. The series draws parallels between the decaying state of the ecology and the psychological state of humans.[8] These examples suggest institutions as extensions of the presented personas of the artists and, in reverse, can be understood as spaces for the artists to structure their public identity.

A spatial mapping of the way artists traversed the art circle is particularly important for Hong Kong, where high property prices directly impact the conditions of art-making, physically and thus, conceptually.[9] The gathering and subsequent eviction of artists from the short-lived Oil Street Artist Village (1998–2000) is marked out in my timeline to emphasise the instability of having a physical space for artists to create, display, and communicate about art.[10] The congestion of physical space extended to artists’ anxiety over their conceptual space for art making, corresponding to changes in the social environment and political regime during the late 1980s and ’90s. This anxiety is encapsulated in Choi’s Drowned III: Swimming in the Dark (1993, fig. 2), part of a series that responded to the “trauma” of the June Fourth incident in 1984 and the Handover in 1997.[11] Tidily stacked books were contained in glass cases, drowned in oil to slowly disintegrate. These glass cases were put on pedestals that inferred their importance, amplifying the eerie atmosphere and the sense of helplessness as the words in the books were rendered non-functional and disappeared before the embedded ideas could be read. At the time, the medium of installation art connoted instability, which echoed the ephemerality of space in a city with limited land and uncertain sovereignty.[12]

Against the theme of disappearance and instability, the people activating art spaces sustained their communities even as institutions and spaces were destabilized. The formation of Videotage in 1986 by Pau, Fung, Wong Chifai 黃志輝, and Comyn Mo 毛文羽, who met through the then-disbanded Phoenix Cine Club, reflects a continuity overlooked in institutional histories. Relational links between artists and art institutions also provide interesting ways to think about the ideological links between the art practices of different artists. Geographical proximity between Videotage and Zuni Icosahedron, a performance art group, shaped both the works of Fung and Pau.[13] Fung’s Thought 3 (1989) includes a video documentation of Zuni’s theatre performance October, using the theatre stage as a metaphor for life.[14] Pau’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1989) includes clips documented from the same performance by Zuni.[15] A rhizomatic mapping of Hong Kong’s art circle can reveal connections that would be neglected in a linear narrative of Hong Kong art history.

Beyond local connections, long-distance networks reflected in my timeline reveal moments of increased external interest in Hong Kong art following the June Fourth incident and the Handover. These networks provided artists in the late ’80s and ’90s with the foundation to consider Hong Kong’s position as a cosmopolitan city and challenge the East/West narrative in reading Hong Kong art.[16] Writing about her Drowned series, Choi notes and compares the different responses based on the cultural context the work was staged.[17] Her training and experience outside Hong Kong supplemented her with an in-depth perspective of the reception to her work in different contexts, an awareness that impacted the way she considered her position in the field.[18] This global awareness not only shaped the artists’ independent art-making practices but also the way they assessed Hong Kong’s cultural sphere and the institutions they founded to contribute to Hong Kong’s art ecology.

For the Choi, Pau, and Fung, institution-building is significant in two-fold: it established them as leaders, while laying a foundation for the local art ecology. Institution-building was also a way for the artists to claim physical and conceptual space, with the institutions acting as anchors for the artists as their roles shifted throughout their artistic careers and reflecting the artistic concerns of their founders which coalesced with the reputation of the institution. By foregrounding the artists behind institutions and visualizing the mobility of the three artists, my timeline prompts an investigation into how one becomes an artist in Hong Kong and emphasizes the artists’ agency through institution-building which granted them additional cultural capital and autonomy to shape their artistic identity.

Footnotes

[1] In interviews and writing, the three artists acknowledge their role as pioneers. Choi recognised herself as a “forerunner of installation art in Hong Kong.” See Choi Yan-chi, “Am I Turning Right?,” in [Re]Fabrication: Choi Yan-chi’s 30 years, Paths of Inter-disciplinarity in Art, ed. Linda C. H. Lai (Hong Kong: Para Site, 2006), 30–31. 

In a 2019 interview, Pau recalls that she was one of only eight video artists in Hong Kong when she co-founded Videotage. See Christie Lee, “In Hong Kong, What is Home? Ellen Pau Tackles the Question In Her 30-Year Retrospective,” Zolima Citymag, 1 January 2019, https://zolimacitymag.com/hong-kong-home-ellen-pau-tackles-the-question-in-her-30-year-retrospective/. 

In another 2019 interview, Fung shared that in 1989 “there were a handful of video artists—including Ellen Pau and me—who were very active, so we were treated as pioneers of video art in Hong Kong.” See Ellen Oredsson, “From 1989 to Now: May Fung on Video Art,” M+ Magazine, 19 September 2019, https://stories.mplus.org.hk/en/blog/from-1989-to-now-may-fung-on-video-art/.

[2] Ellen Pau, “Interview with Ellen Pau, 15 September 1998 (Part 2),” interview by Leung Chi-wo Warren, Stories of Hong Kong Artists—Interviews by Leung Chi Wo (1998), Asia Art Archive, 15 September 1998, audio, 13:20, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/183407.

[3] Videotage organised the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival from 1996 until 2006, when it became an independent organisation. In an interview with Phoebe Wong, Ellen Pau mentions reconsidering her relationship with the contemporary art scene in Hong Kong after her solo exhibition at Para Site. See Ellen Pau, “Ellen Pau in Conversation with Phoebe Wong,” interview by Phoebe Wong, Ocula Magazine, 18 January 2019, https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/ellen-pau/. 

In “Interview with Ellen Pau, 15 September 1998 (Part 2)” with Leung Chi-wo, she brought up Canada, Germany, and the United States, among others, in comparison with Hong Kong’s art scene, suggesting the need to emulate the cultural infrastructures overseas.

[4] Ellen Pau, “Ellen Pau in Conversation with Phoebe Wong.”

[5] Choi Yan-chi, “Am I Turning Right?,” 28–29.

[6] “ACO Team,” Art and Culture Outreach, accessed 29 October 2020, https://www.aco.hk/team. 

[7] May Fung, “Interview with Fung Meiwah May, 23 October 1998 — Transcript (English),” interview by Leung Chi-wo Warren, Stories of Hong Kong Artists—Interviews by Leung Chi Wo (1998), Asia Art Archive, 23 October 1998, transcription, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/185363.

[8] May Fung, “May Fung’s Installation Art: Reflection,” in May Fung: Everything Starts from Here, ed. Leung Chi-wo and Leung Chin-fung (Hong Kong: Para Site, 2002), 22–23, https://issuu.com/parasite_hk/docs/2002_ex_8_box_5_3. 

[9] In a 2020 interview, May Fung described lack of money and space as the main challenges faced by emerging artists, which formed the motivation behind founding the Art and Culture Outreach. See May Fung, “Art Should Not Be Sensible: In Conversation with May Fung,” interview by Karen Cheung and Chelsea Ma, Asia Art Archive, 3 August 3 2020, https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/art-should-not-be-sensible-in-conversation-with-may-fung. 

[10] “Oil Street Archive,” Asia Art Archive, accessed 25 March 2025, https://aaa.org.hk/en/archive-collection/1184.

[11] Choi Yan-chi, “Am I Turning Right?,” 24–25.

[12] Choi recalls that mediums of performance and installation art were ways to defy stable identities and existing frameworks in art. See “Am I Turning Right?,” 28–31. 

Choi’s contemporary Lo Kwai-cheung 羅貴祥 describes her work as avant-garde, linking “the will to transgress the confinement of space as a container” and “the subversive impulses within an orderly paradigm” in installation art, which “subtly refers to the character of our contemporary society.” See Lo Kwai-cheung, “Installing Instability,” in Re]Fabrication: Choi Yan-chi’s 30 years, Paths of Inter-disciplinarity in Art, 112–115.

[13] From its inception, Videotage shared space in Happy Valley with Zuni Icosahedron, an experimental performance art group, before moving to the Oil Street Artist Village in 1998. See Christie Lee, “In Hong Kong, What is Home?” 

In her 1998 interview with Leung Chi-wo, Fung mentions that her participation in Zuni’s performances heightened her awareness of body movement and performativity. See May Fung, “Interview with Fung Meiwah May, 23 October 1998 — Transcript (English).” 

Pau’s works, including Love in the Time of Cholera (1989) and Drained II (1989), use video documentations of Zuni’s performances. The description of Drained II (1989) in the exhibition brochure of “Ellen Pau: What about Home Affairs? — A Retrospective” (Para Site, 2018), says “The video documented one of Zuni Icosahedron’s performances in the late 1980s, signaling a milestone era when the artist began to experiment with screen-based media in combination with the stage, dance and installation arts.” See “Ellen Pau: What about Home Affairs? — A Retrospective,” Para Site, accessed 25 March 2025, https://www.para-site.art/exhibitions/ellen-pau-what-about-home-affairs-a-retrospective. 

[14] In her 1998 interview with Leung Chi-wo, Fung talks about Thought 3 (1989) as a work that mixes the medium of video screening and solo reading, an element of theatre. See May Fung, “Interview with Fung Meiwah May, 23 October 1998.” 

Also see Lok Fung, “From Personal to Political: Deconstructing May Fung’s Short Film and Video Creations,” in May Fung: Everything Starts from Here, ed. Leung Chi-wo and Leung Chin-fung (Hong Kong: Para Site, 2002), 8–9, https://issuu.com/parasite_hk/docs/2002_ex_8_box_5_3. 

[15] “The Great Movement: Ellen Pau Solo Exhibition,” Kiang Malingue Gallery, accessed 25 March 2025, https://kiangmalingue.com/exhibitions/ellen-pau-the-great-movement.

[16] Carolyn Cartier, “Hong Kong and the Production of Art in the Post/Colonial City,” China Information 22, no. 2 (2008): 248–252. Cartier proposes locality as a way of digressing from the China/West narrative in Hong Kong art, using a point of view of Hong Kong as a liminal space.

[17] Choi Yan-chi, “Am I Turning Right?,” 26–27. Choi makes a comparison between the responses of “Chinese, Asians and Germans” who associate Drowned with the “destructiveness of totalitarianism” and the “British, Australians, Canadians as well as New Age intellectuals” who felt “a sense of relief.”

[18] Ibid., 26–27. Choi has a BFA and MFA from The Chicago Institute of Art and resided in Canada from 1993 to 1997. She writes about an anecdote from her Fellowship show in 1976 that can be read as a turning point in her practice, from painting to installation. Her tutor’s response to her painted works made her feel an “otherness” that turned her away from her conviction of her role to “steer Chinese contemporary art” through painting, which instigated Choi’s exploration of “new domains” as she returned to Hong Kong.

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Yi Ting Lee was a participant in the Hong Kong Art Workshop, a class of the Department of Art History at The University of Hong Kong in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, in 2020.